When Catherine grows up, a long journey of exploration will begin. Discovering her father, Marco Pivato, who suddenly passed away at the age of 42. Caterina is only one year old and, in the near future, her searches in the digital universe will be even faster and more complete than today: she will discover that Marco was a man of many talents and continuous ideas. She will bring to light articles and videos, lectures and books and will be able to immerse herself in the wonders that her father told and explained.
The definition of a science journalist, in this case, is insufficient. Historical collaborator of Tuttoscienze and Tuttosalute and then of the Health platform, he not only wrote many pieces, but contributed to their conception, with reflections and proposals. His style was always the same. Barely bending his head, squinting his eyes, he seemed to be looking for a starting point, the foothold from which to start: sometimes a character, sometimes an abstract concept, sometimes a discovery. And from there, as if carrying out a reflection aloud, he organized the threads of his thought of him, explaining first of all to himself how the next article could be born. Worried that in that mental ladder each element would combine with the others, to compose the tapestry to be presented to the readers. To which he wanted to give a set of rigor and clarity and, at the same time, sparks of amazement and surprise: science – the passionate readers of Tuttoscienze know this well – is an adventure that combines intelligence and serendipity: even Einstein would frown in hold a smartphone in your hands.
He had a special familiarity with medicines and vaccines thanks to his studies in pharmacology, but, as happens to those who deal with scientific topics, he enjoyed emphasizing how blurred the boundaries between disciplines were and therefore constantly pushing his gaze further. If you write about a drug, sooner or later, you will come across biology or genetics and you cannot help but evoke the logic of information technology and the role of super-computers. And then you will probably continue, immersing yourself in the world of research and the laws of Big Pharma. Jumping from neuroscience to physics, from live investigations on the brain to research on the origins of the Universe, is part of the job of a good science journalist, who can never stop studying, forced to admit his limits and strive to overcome them. Marco knew the ways and techniques to get to the heart of news: how to verify it, build it, discuss lights and shadows. And see the wide-ranging implications. Philosophical and social. If the sources are labyrinthine, he knew how to proceed without getting lost. Time, for a journalist, is as precious as accuracy. It is no coincidence that, as a spokesman for the Italian Society of Pharmacology, he contributed to devising a series of strategies against fake news: dismantling them in times of Covid proved to be fundamental. An endless struggle and therefore even more necessary.
Anyone who has known Marco knows that each piece, for him, represented the continuation of something and the beginning of something else. Like a chain of genes or memes. Certainly a newspaper page or a screen of the web seemed to him a part of a larger whole and for this reason, from a very young age, he followed the call of writing that goes beyond the classic 4,000 or 6,000 characters. Jokingly, he said: “And what does it take to write a book?”. A lot, of course. But for him the effort amounted to a bet and a fun: his essays were born from the tangle of ideas and research that accompanied each article. And they are destined to remain as popular classics. “The mugged miracle. The four wasted opportunities of Italian science in the Sixties ”,“ Noverar le stelle. What do scientists and poets have in common ”,“ Using your brain. What science can teach politics ”with Gianvito Martino and“ Communists on the Moon. The last myth of the Russian Revolution ”with his father Stefano are so many proofs of skill, in which science declines with history and current events.
Now Marco’s friends think with tenderness about the moment when his daughter Caterina will begin to discover her father Marco. He will find the many images of a cultured and sensitive man, a journalist and a writer. To Caterina Marco he attributed the greatest amazement, that of observing a miniature human being reflected in the ecstatic gazes of his parents. Caterina was his love for him, equaled only by that for his wife Alessandra.