Early Life
Born in Turin to a Jewish family, together with her twin sister Paola she was the youngest of four children. Her parents were Adamo Levi, an electrical engineer and gifted mathematician, and Adele Montalcini, a painter.
Levi-Montalcini decided to attend medical school after seeing a close family friend die of cancer, overcoming the objections of her father who believed that "a professional career would interfere with the duties of a wife and mother". She enrolled in the Turin medical school in 1930. After graduating in 1936, she went to work as Giuseppe Levi's assistant, but her academic career was cut short by Benito Mussolini's 1938 Manifesto of Race and the subsequent introduction of laws barring Jews from academic and professional careers.
Read more about this topic: Rita Levi-Montalcini
Famous quotes related to early life:
“Many a woman shudders ... at the terrible eclipse of those intellectual powers which in early life seemed prophetic of usefulness and happiness, hence the army of martyrs among our married and unmarried women who, not having cultivated a taste for science, art or literature, form a corps of nervous patients who make fortunes for agreeable physicians ...”
—Sarah M. Grimke (1792–1873)