Morte di un matematico napoletano (1992)

On the night of May 2, 1959, in the waiting room of Rome’s Termini Station, railway police stop a man who is plainly drunk. He is Professor Renato Caccioppoli, a university lecturer in pure mathematics at the University of Naples, a member of the Lincean Academy, Maria Bakunin’s nephew on his mother’s side, and a celebrated scientist listed in police files as a communist. Released shortly after being stopped, the professor sets off again the next morning on the first train to Naples. Disillusioned and tormented, now a slave to alcohol, fresh from a psychiatric hospital, abandoned by his wife, and estranged from his PCI party comrades and his colleagues at the university, Caccioppoli lives out the final week of his life. We see him with friends, family, and colleagues, or alone, wandering disenchanted through a sweltering Naples. He feels like an outsider in academic circles; his mathematical genius torments and exhausts him, the party no longer trusts him, his romantic relationships have disappointed him, and family ties weigh on him. A long-postponed plan becomes increasingly pressing: suicide, his final act as a free man. No single reason outweighs the others in explaining his suicide. During the funeral service, the speeches of those present capture the strange figure whose life and death have shaken the respectable townspeople out of their quiet, ordinary lives.