Pisa Mayor Michele Conti has announced
a million euros in funding to restore the Marconi radio
transmission station at Coltano near Pisa in view of the
conference 'A Newly Connected World, A Story That Continues'
taking place in Pisa on Monday October 11 on the 90th
anniversary of the illumination of Rio de Janeiro's Christ the
Redeemer statue by Guglielmo Marconi.
The station has for years been in a woeful state of repair and
has been listed near the top of the Italian Environment Fund's
(FAI) 'Places of the Heart' to be restored. The city council has
got the lease for two years and is now looking for partnerships.
"We want to invest a million euros for the first work of
consolidation and repair," Conti went on,"but we are aware that
we can't make it on our own, and that is why we are hoping for
international partnerships, both public and private, with the
aim of creating a Marconi museum at Coltano, in collaboration
with the existing one of the Marconi Foundation, flanking a
modern system of start-ups that can be placed inside the same
structure to ideally unite the past and the future of
telecommunications and restore, finally, to new life this
important piece of world communication history."
Nobel Prize winner Guglielmo Marconi amazed the world on October
31, 1931 when he transmitted from Via dei Condotti in Rome a
signal to the station in Coltano, whence that signal was then
sent on to Brazil to illuminate the Christ statue in Rio de
Janeiro.
"From that moment on," the mayor recalled, "the world would
change as far as telecommunications was concerned."
Pisa, he added, "has always been an attractive city, which has
seen the presence of many researchers who went on to fill
important posts at an international level. From Galileo's
studies to Marconi, up to 1986 when the first Internet signal
was sent.
"And then on up to the present day when VIRGO, 10 kilometres
from Pisa where very important work on gravitational waves
continues to be carried out. It is in this context, unique in
the world, that Pisa wants to continue to make history in
research and science and to be one of their international
capitals".
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED © Copyright ANSA
