“At 100, I have a mind that is superior – thanks to experience – than when I was 20”, neuroscientist Rita Levi-Montalcini famously said in an interview, two years before her death in 2012. A researcher in her native Italy, Belgium and the US, Italian senator, UN ambassador and philanthropist, the first woman to be elected in the Pontifical Academy of Science, President of the Multiple Sclerosis Association in Italy, Levi-Montalcini seems to have never stopped.

Born in 1909 to a wealthy Jewish family in Turin, Italy, Levi-Montalcini was expected to lead a comfortable life as a housewife. 

“At twenty, I realised that I could not possibly adjust to a feminine role as conceived by my father, and asked his permission to engage in a professional career”, Levi-Montalcini declared in her Nobel Prize acceptance speech. “In eight months I filled my gaps in Latin, Greek and mathematics.”

Seven years later, Levi-Montalcini graduated from medical school in Turin with summa cum laude in Medicine and Surgery. She then went on to study neurology and psychiatry. Levi-Montalcini was still trying to figure out whether to become a doctor or a researcher when Mussolini issued the Manifesto per la Difesa della Razza, which barred academic and professional careers to non-Arian Italians.