In this episode we will explore the world of the Sun King as if it were a distant planet where everything was different: medicine, technology, education, hygiene and daily life. Even nature was different: Europe at that time was still full of forests where deer, wild boars and wolves roamed. Hunting was a typical pastime of the king, Louis XIV set out every day on horseback with his squires to go and capture some game. He was a good eater at the table, but devouring all that game eventually gave him a deadly gout, which at a certain point degenerated into gangrene that led to his death.
Waterloo was Napoleon's last battle, marking his final disappearance from the scene and his exile on Saint Helena until his death. The Battle of Waterloo was one of the bloodiest events of the 19th century: it is estimated that the dead, missing and wounded were a total of 48,000, all of which took place in the space of a few hours, on a relatively small terrain and with a violence rarely seen.
In this episode we will retrace Marco Polo's journey, the journey he recounted in his famous book Il Milione. 15 thousand kilometers from Venice to Beijing, crossing deserts, steppes and very high mountains and back. We will understand what it meant to travel at that time in difficult territories, without roads, without the possibility of aid and resources, crossing much of the Middle East, crossing the Himalayas, to finally arrive in China.
Our story begins in Vinci, not far from Florence, on April 15, 1452. It is the mid-1400s, a time of great intellectual fervor in Tuscany, Florence, Siena, Pisa, but also elsewhere in Italy. But Leonardo does not know all this, he lives in Vinci and attends the abacus school.
In this episode we will follow step by step a truly extraordinary story: that of Christopher Columbus. A man who had an idea that was considered crazy at the time and made it happen. That is, reaching the East by passing through the West, crossing an immense and unknown ocean.
In this episode we will tell you the most beautiful story written in antiquity. It is like a great film, it has the structure of a TV series, even though it was written 3 thousand years ago. It is the Odyssey, or rather the long journey of Ulysses towards home after the fall of Troy. A journey that lasted 10 years, during which Ulysses faces the most incredible dangers and adventures.
In this episode we resume the journey with Ulysses that began last episode, an extraordinary, adventurous journey that Homer recounted in the most famous poem of antiquity: the Odyssey.
On the occasion of the centenary of his birth, in 2001, Superquark dedicated a special episode of the program to Enrico Fermi, in two parts. Mixing excerpts from films and documentary narration, the program retraces Fermi's origins and his studies that took him, very young, to the Scuola Normale di Pisa. It talks about the fertile period of "I ragazzi di Via Panisperna" in Rome when together with Rasetti, Amaldi, Segré, Majorana, D'Agostino and Pontecorvo he worked on reactions produced by atomic nuclei by the action of slow neutrons.
Explores the group's relations with the fascist regime and the mysterious disappearance of Majorana; shows some laboratory instruments used by Fermi in the 1930s; talks about his departure for the USA, the awarding of the Nobel Prize in 1938 and the work of building the atomic pile, with the first nuclear chain reaction on 2 December 1942.
Giuseppe Garibaldi, a name that immediately evokes 100 images, memories and sensations. We all met him for the first time in school books with his strange cap and poncho.
In this episode, our journey continues alongside Giuseppe Garibaldi, this extraordinary character who, after fighting for the ideals of freedom and equality in South America, finally manages to return to his homeland after a long exile and puts his passion at the service of Italian unity.
In this episode we return to ancient Egypt to follow a true story told in a papyrus found by archaeologists during their excavations: it is the story of a tomb robber and his trial.
This episode is dedicated to a man who, with the help of pen and paper, managed to penetrate the great secrets of atoms and the universe: Albert Einstein.
On November 9, 1799, a coup d'état took place in France that would change its history and that of Europe. Napoleon overthrew the parliamentary regime by force of arms and took power.
Twenty years after the Chernobyl tragedy, Piero Angela and a crew from Superquark have produced a special dedicated to those places that are still isolated for a radius of 30 km. The nuclear reactor, which exploded on the night of April 26, 1986, is not yet turned off: the melted fuel is still incandescent. The emergency cover has cracks, and there are fears of a collapse if nothing is done soon. The Superquark crew went to the sites of the disaster: to the nuclear power plant and to the ghost town of Prypiat, hastily abandoned by its inhabitants and left as it was at the time. An English fiction will reconstruct with actors what happened that night in the control room, and all the lies that followed in the following 36 hours. With Paco Lanciano and with the help of models Piero Angela will explain why the reactor exploded.
Imperial Rome. An expanding city made of large squares, palaces, marble, aqueducts, temples. After many years of war, Rome discovered itself to be an enormous and powerful city, the head of all peoples. It was led by a single man: his name was Gaius Julius Caesar Octavian, they called him Augustus, that is, the consecrated one. It was Augustus who brought peace to the chaos and made Rome the center of the universe, creating a center of power that represented the model for the 79 emperors who succeeded him over the course of the following four centuries.
Starting from the Colosseum, in this episode we would like to propose a journey across four continents to discover ten great works of the past, which have left a deep mark on human history, for the most diverse reasons. These are royal palaces, cathedrals, palaces, monuments, which represent some of the highest places in the path of humanity.
