She could embed embryos in the melted wax which, once hardened, she would cut into paper-thin slivers, so that she could view nerve cells in the slices in the microscope from Milan. The bed was against one of the long walls, and at the opposite wall she put shelves, on which sat a heater for melting wax, and an egg incubator that her brother built with a thermostat and a fan. It was equipped with a camera, and a device with mirrors that would allow her to see both microscopic detail and her own hand next to the microscope at the same time, so she could trace on paper the tiny nerve cells that she viewed. Near her bed she placed the more elaborate microscope that she carried from Milan, a new model with two eyepieces so she could look into it with both eyes. In front of the window, she placed a table for opening eggs and a simple microscope for operating on the embryos. The bedroom was long and narrow, and opposite its entrance was a window, which overlooked the courtyard. Levi-Montalcini responded to the tumult by transforming her bedroom into her own research lab. No lights were permitted to be visible from homes or shops. The city was dark each night as a blackout was enforced across Italy. A fascist manifesto asserted that Jews do not belong to the Italian race, and declared, contrary to popular sentiment in Italy, “It is time that Italians proclaim themselves genuinely racist.” In June 1940, Mussolini joined Hitler by declaring war on France and Great Britain, and Britain responded with nighttime aerial bombings of Italy through summer and fall, focused on Turin and other industrial cities. There was little for Levi-Montalcini and her family to do outside of the apartment Mussolini’s laws restricted Jews from most jobs and schools and threatened to confiscate Jewish-owned property.

Some of the rooms faced into the apartment building’s common courtyard. The apartment, in the center of Turin, was large, with 10 rooms, including a bedroom for each family member and a common living room. Levi-Montalcini moved in with her mother, her twin sister Paola, who was an artist, and her architect brother Gino, in her childhood home. Levi-Montalcini often brought her microscope and precious glass slides with her. As bombs fell, they fled into the cellar beneath their apartment building. TAKE SHELTER: Author Bob Goldstein traces the steps that Rita Levi-Montalcini and her family took during WWII in Turin, Italy. The “whole world was in danger,” Levi-Montalcini later wrote. When Hitler invaded Poland in September, launching war, her worst frustrations were realized. Her passion for research alternated with her frustration with challenges. Rita wrote home to her mother of an “infinite desire to embrace you again,” but research at the university in Turin would have been impossible had she returned home. Levi-Montalcini also spent time with her older sister Nina, whose family was in Belgium as well. Mussolini’s ban had pushed Levi-Montalcini to leave Italy for Belgium in 1939, where she did research using fertilized chicken eggs as a source of material for her research topic: the developing nervous systems of vertebrate embryos.

Levi-Montalcini was not raised in the Jewish religion, but her Jewish ancestry would have been evident from her surname. In 1938, the Italian dictator Mussolini banned Jews from positions in universities. Despite her father’s disapproval, she had trained in medicine, inspired by seeing a nanny succumb to cancer. Levi-Montalcini was a 31-year-old scientist who had been working at the University of Turin. Just a week after her trip, British bombers hit Milan. The officers found her new microscope instead. With wartime food rationing, panettone cakes were only available illegally. On her return to the Turin train station, two police officers stopped her and demanded to see inside the cake-sized box that she was carrying. On a cold, dry Tuesday in December, 1940, Rita Levi-Montalcini rode a train from the station near her home in Turin, Italy, for 80 miles to Milan to buy a microscope.

Rita levi montalcini