Cristina Roccati Portrait
This portrait of Cristina Roccati (left) is by the contemporary Italian painter and engraver Matteo Massagrande. In the background is the only depiction of Roccati (right) from the 18th century. Manuela Callari
In 1988, Paula Findlen was strolling under the Renaissance arcades of Via Zamboni in Bologna, Italy. A graduate student in history of science at the University of California, Berkeley, who was visiting the city’s university, she was contemplating the growth of natural history museums and cabinets of curiosity, the themes of her approaching dissertation. As she walked past a bookstore, her eyes landed on a book displayed in its window, Alma Mater Studiorum:La presenza femminile dal XVIII al XX secolo. The book came out of the University of Bologna’s 900th anniversary, which was celebrated that year. “I remember very clearly,” Findlen, a historian who studies science and medicine at Stanford University, says. “That is how I first discovered the early women of science in the Italian peninsula.”
As Findlen eagerly flicked the pages, she stumbled upon Cristina Roccati, an 18th-century trailblazer from the small town of Rovigo in northern Italy who defied societal norms to study physics and philosophy. Findlen was so intrigued by the unusual figure that, after graduation, she obtained a grant to return to Bologna in the summer of 1989 to dig up the stories of women scholars in the 18th century from the Italian archives. While in Bologna, she visited the Accademia dei Concordi, a cultural academy in Rovigo, whenever she could, where her endless hours of poring over Roccati’s writings, academic records and contemporary accounts brought the physicist’s story to life.
From her birth in 1732, Cristina Roccati’s life unfolded against a backdrop of aristocratic intrigue and intellectual ambition. Rovigo, with its 5,000 inhabitants nestled in the foggy and fertile Po River Valley, was a cultural crossroads between the Republic of Venice and the Papal State, of which Bologna was part, in an Italy fragmented into contending states. Among the Italian elites, knowledge was a form of social currency, and learned women were admired as symbols of familial and civic prestige. However, while intellectual accomplishments could enhance a woman’s status, few were encouraged to pursue formal education beyond what was considered socially acceptable. Most aristocratic women were expected to marry well, securing alliances that reinforced family wealth and influence. “That was one version of investment,” Findlen says. But by the 18th century the Republic of Venice was in decline, and some aristocratic families, though still noble in name, had lost much of their wealth and could not afford a substantial dowry. Cultivating a daughter’s education offered an alternative means of increasing her desirability and securing her future. Even so, earning a university degree, as Roccati did, remained an extraordinary rarity; women’s education usually happened within the privacy of their family libraries.
Roccati was the eldest daughter of Giovan Battista Roccati, an ambitious patrician, and Antonia Campo, who belonged to one of the most prominent families in the city. The Roccati family was not noble but had married into nobility. Giovan Battista soon realized that his eldest daughter, Cristina, rather than his son, Alessandro, or his younger daughter, Marianna, had the intellectual talent to grow the family’s prestige. Like his father before him, Alessandro married a noblewoman. The youngest daughter was so illiterate that she could not even write her own name. Cristina became the focus of Giovan Battista’s investment. Noticing her precocious interest in reading as a child, he built a library and hired a tutor to support her intellectual ambitions.
By the age of 15, Cristina Roccati had surpassed her tutor’s knowledge in classical literature, mathematics and natural philosophy. She yearned for more, and her father allowed her to pursue a university degree. “That is very atypical,” Findlen explains. Despite historical accounts of women teaching and attending university lectures behind screens from the late Middle Ages, such depictions were more myth than truth. The idea of sending a daughter away from home to study was almost unimaginable until the late 19th century.
Padua seemed the ideal choice for Roccati because of its proximity to Rovigo, but the city’s university did not accept women. Immediately after awarding Elena Lucrezia Cornaro Piscopia a degree in the late 17th century, the university’s rectors established legislation barring women from studying there.
In 1747, Roccati, accompanied by her aunt and tutor for decorum, journeyed by carriage to the University of Bologna. There, she became the first woman to officially attend university courses as a non-resident, sitting alongside male students in public lectures. Her attendance was a radical departure from the norm. At a time when women’s education was confined to private libraries and salons, Roccati’s presence in the public intellectual sphere was both unprecedented and revolutionary.
Women of knowledge did not emerge from university benches, Findlen explains. “They were hidden secrets that grew on their own and were eventually acclaimed and celebrated like quasi-celebrities,” she says. By then, the only two Italian women who had received a degree as recognition for their erudition were Piscopia at the University of Padua in 1678, and Laura Bassi at the University of Bologna in 1732.
For three years, Cristina immersed herself in the study of natural philosophy, Aristotelian physics and Cartesian geometry. She observed physics experiments, attended sessions in Bologna’s famed anatomical theater and engaged in the city’s intellectual life. She also dedicated herself to the humanities and wrote erudite poems, a fashionable pastime, which gave women a certain social prestige.
Cristina Roccati Manuscript
A manuscript by Cristina Roccati from an astronomy lesson she held in Rovigo between 1751 and 1777 Manuela Callari
As her period of study was nearing its end, her father decided that her public thesis defense should be held in Rovigo to increase her fame in the Republic of Venice. Invitations were sent far and wide, and professors gathered from neighboring cities to judge her thesis. After a successful defense, Roccati returned to Bologna, where local professors re-examined her. In May 1751, at just 19 years old, Roccati graduated with a degree in philosophy, becoming the third in Italy to achieve such recognition. And in her final speech, she greeted the audience with gratitude: “Mother of all Sciences and all the Arts. By honoring me, today you honor all women who love knowledge. Thank you, University of Bologna.”
Returning to Rovigo, she found the town’s intellectual climate stifling. Despite the growing recognition of women’s place in the learned world, smaller towns like Rovigo lacked cultural and intellectual opportunities. With her father’s blessing, Roccati moved to Padua to study astronomy and Newtonian physics. She would have liked to remain in the Venetian city, but after two years, she had to return home when her father was caught up in a financial scandal, and the family was short of money. Back in her hometown, she was forced to sell her cherished library to cover some of the debt. But her passion for science burned undiminished. “She was a simple woman but extremely determined,” says Elena Canadelli, a historian of science at the University of Padua.
She dedicated the next 25 years to teaching physics, delivering lessons at the Tempio della Beata Vergine del Soccorso, or La Rotonda, as the people of Rovigo call it for its octagonal design. The church was a religious center, a place for community gatherings and a cultural hub for the local elite and intellectuals, where Roccati schooled mostly men. She left over one thousand pages of manuscript physics lessons, all beautifully written in her distinctive, almost childish, personal hand, embedded with meticulous diagrams. “It is a unique archive,” Findlen says.
In 1754, she was appointed, not without some grumbling from the more conservative members of the society, “Prince” of the Accademia dei Concordi for her skill in explaining Galilean science and Newtonian physics. She died in Rovigo in her 60s, quite old for the time. Today her whole story, that of “the woman who dared to study physics,” is told at Palazzo Roncale in Rovigo in an exhibition curated by Canadelli. And her name graces one of the 26 cameras on the European Space Agency’sPlatosatellite, which will launch in 2026 to search for Earth-like exoplanets. Among the pioneers of astronomy and science honored by the mission, Roccati is probably the least known.
PLATO Satellite
One of the 26 cameras on the PLATO satellite, undergoing testing here, is named after Roccati. ESA-Remedia
Roccati had all it takes to become a symbol of feminism in science, yet today, few know her name outside her hometown. “Our tendency is to heroize the scientists who make great discoveries and big inventions,” says Findlen. “But the vast majority of scientific work is not about those eureka moments. It is about the daily life of the gradual, often uneven and halting accrual of knowledge. It is also about teaching and transferring bodies of knowledge from one generation to another.”
Today, the debates around gender and science are still heated and enclose complex cultural, social, political and economic factors that are at the root of the difficulties that women—and even more so, women of color and other genders—continue to experience in achieving an equal place with men in the scientific arena. “The past seems to speak to us of all great male figures of thinkers and scientists—solitary and brilliant men, capable of formulating theories and shaping societies, offering a reductive image of the scientific practice itself,” Canadelli writes in the exhibition catalog.
Diverse perspectives and experiences lead to better innovation and more comprehensive solutions, says Athene Donald, a retired experimental physicist at the University of Cambridge and author of the book Not Just for the Boys: Why We Need More Women in Science.
People from different genders and backgrounds will approach problems in different ways, bringing a wider range of ideas and insights. “Having a diversity of scientists, including women and people from different cultures,” she says, “ensures that the research and solutions address the needs and perspectives of the whole population, not just a narrow segment.”