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Lucio Russo
(1944-2025)
Museo Galileo joins the condolences of family members on the passing of Lucio Russo, Italian physicist, mathematician and historian of science, who passed away on July 12, 2025. A physics graduate of the University of Naples, he taught probability calculus at the University of Rome, Tor Vergata. He spent periods of study at the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques in Paris and Princeton University. Passionate about history, he has authored publications that have given rise to considerable debates within the community of historians of science. His final work, The Cultural Collapse: The Roman Conquest of the Mediterranean, 146-145 B.C. (Carocci 2022), completed a significant body of work that began with The Forgotten Revolution (Feltrinelli 1996), continued with Flows and Ebbs (Feltrinelli 2003), and The Forgotten America: Relations between Civilizations and a Mistake by Ptolemy (Mondadori 2013).
A common thread running through these monographs is the conviction, based on meticulous study of classical sources, that science in the modern sense emerged in the Hellenistic period, reaching remarkable heights. The dramatic decline of knowledge, particularly during the 3rd century BCE, occurred due to Rome’s conquest of the Mediterranean, leading to a subsequent crisis of knowledge across all fields. Furthermore, in these works, Russo firmly advanced the belief that scientific knowledge is not a continuous, additive process, but rather an extended trajectory characterized by periods of rapid progress, setbacks, and rediscovery.
