Piazza delle Baleari
- Bruno Pontecorvo (Marina di Pisa 1913 - Dubna 1993), world-renowned scientist, fundamental figure of modern science, together with Enrico Fermi and Ettore Maiorana, has contributed to developing the physics of today and tomorrow. His studies on 'neutrinos' has opened the doors to a research sector which in recent years has proved to be among the richest in news and results. In 1955 the scientist became a member of the Communist Party: in those years he was mainly concerned with the birth of 'strange particles' and inaugurated the physics of high energy neutrinos.
- Guido Pontecorvo (Pisa 1907 - Pisa 1999) Graduated in 1928 from the Faculty of Agriculture of the University of Pisa. After leaving Italy due to the racial laws of the fascist regime, he decided to stop in Edinburgh, starting his brilliant research in the field of genetics: he was director of the Genetics department of the University of Glasgow and a member of the staff of the Imperial Cancer Research Fund of London. He was among the first to undertake studies for the determination of human chromosome maps and introduced the technique of irradiation with X-rays to cause chromosome breakage.
- Gilberto Pontecorvo, called Gillo (Pisa, 1919 - Rome 2006), director, screenwriter and actor. Following the racial laws, he moved to Paris where he met Picasso and Sartre... and began his career in film. Back in Italy he joined the Communist party and in the post-war period he acted in a work financed by ANPI (Il sole sorge ancora - Outcry, 1946). He then started to shoot documentaries with a social background (including Pane e zolfo, 1956, about the Marche miners). In 1957 he made his first feature film (La grande strada azzurra - The wide blue road) with Yves Montand and Terence Hill... but his best-known work was La battaglia di Algeri - The Battle of Algiers (1966) which won the Golden Lion at the International Film Festival of Venice. The film tells us how the Algerian people came to independence from France. In 1969 he describes the overwhelming colonialism in South America in the film Queimada, starring Marlon Brando; and in 1979 he addressed the theme of the Basque terrorism during the Francoism in the film Ogro with Gian Maria Volonté...
