Intellectuals displaced from fascist Italy
© Firenze University Press 2019
Stefano Esteban Montuori (formerly Goldberger)
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In the documents of the University of Turin, where he had come at the age of
18 to study medicine, his forename is Italianized. In 1935 Stefano took an
Italian surname, becoming Montuori rather than Goldberger. Born in a small
town in the then Austro-Hungarian Empire, he felt Italy to be his country. But
the race laws took it all away: Italian citizenship, work as a doctor, university
rank and employment. He followed the example of his teacher Amedeo
Herlitzka and moved to Argentina.
A foreign student in Italy
He was born in Bátorkeszi, in Hungary, on 4 June 1906 to Davide Goldberger
and Karola Goldbergerova, the last of three brothers
1
. On the outbreak of the
First World War, his family moved to Prague, where he attended school and
learned to read and write in Hungarian, Czech and German. When he was 18
he enrolled in the Faculty of Medicine and Surgery in Turin as a foreign
student exempt from enrollment fees, taking advantage of the support
provided by the Gentile reform of 1923, which had paradoxical results with
the arrival of many young Jews from countries in the East
2
. Stefano’s brother
Michele was already in Turin, studying engineering at the Polytechnic.
In the third year of study Stefano, as a research assistant, entered the
Institute of Physiology, directed by Amedeo Herlitzka. The professor engaged
him, with other selected students, in the research into high-altitude
1 Anibal Péres Lloret, Lily Montuori, Esteban Montuori (1906-1995), «Revista Medicina Buenos
Aires», 55, 6, 1995, pp. 726-727. At the end of the First World War Bátorkeszi became a
village in Czechoslovakia and from 1993 in Slovakia.
2 RD n. 2102, 30 September 1923, Ordinamento della istruzione superiore, art. 54. On this
point, see the recent study of Elisa Signori, Migrazioni forzate e strategie formative oltre i
confni. Gli studenti stranieri, ebrei e non, nelle Università italiane (1900-1940) , in Anna Rita
Calabrò (ed.), Disegnare, attraversare, cancellare i confni. Una prospettiva interdisciplinare ,
Milan, Giappichelli, 2018, pp. 184-197.
1
Link to other connected
Lives on the move:
Amedeo Herlitzka
Rita Levi Montalcini
Giuseppe Levi
Aldo Mieli
Rodolfo Mondolfo