Frascati, Italy, near Rome. The first particle accelerator built to collide particles from opposite directions at speeds approaching the speed of light is tested. It is called ADA: Storage Ring. It is the “grandfather” of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Geneva. ADA is therefore the first machine in the world in which particle beams collide head-on after orbiting. It is a great success for the Frascati Laboratories of the newly formed National Institute for Nuclear Physics. During that period, a series of significant circumstances led Italian science on a fascinating adventure that would leave its mark on the future of “elementary particle physics.” This physics was born in the 1940s with the experiment of Marcello Conversi, Ettore Pancini, and Oreste Piccioni, who identified a component of cosmic rays not predicted by any theory: the “muon.” Then, one of Fermi’s dreams came true, thanks to the determination of Edoardo Amaldi and Gilberto Bernardini: a national accelerator to complement the European machines at CERN in Geneva in Italy. The electron synchrotron at the Frascati National Laboratories (LNF) was, at the time, the most efficient accelerator of its kind in the world, built by thirty-three-year-old Giorgio Salvini with a staff of twenty-year-old recent graduates (physicists and engineers, chosen with foresight and trust).
