Content area
Full text
The editors of Functional Neurology, the staff of the Casimiro Mondino Foundation, and the Pavia neurology community note with great sadness the loss of Professor Ennio De Renzi (1924-2014), who passed away on November 9, 2014.
De Renzi was born in Cremona in 1924. In a recent autobiographical paper (De Renzi, 2006) he elegantly summed up the political climate of Italy during his youth. Italy was then engulfed in a "repressive, untruthful and boring" fascist dictatorship, which inexorably led the country into the catastrophe of World War II. He also described fighting in the antifascist Resistance and leaving the Faculty of Law to study medicine at the University of Pavia, where he was admitted to the prestigious Ghislieri College. He obtained his MD in 1950, and completed his specialization in neurology and psychiatry in 1953 at the Institute for Nervous and Mental Diseases, then directed by Carlo Berlucchi.
His first interest was clinical psychiatry, specifically, projective tests such as the Rorschach ink block test (De Renzi et al., 1957). However, he soon became frustrated by the difficulty of obtaining reliable and reproducible results from such tests, and, towards the end of the 50s, began to focus on behavioral disorders associated with cerebral lesions, developing a particular interest in aphasia.
Meanwhile, he had moved from Pavia first to Modena, and then to the Clinica delle Malattie Nervose e Mentali (Clinic of Nervous and Mental Diseases) of the University of Milan, where he found a suitable environment for his research. There he was able to study a large number of patients with diagnoses of focal lesions, particularly stroke and brain tumors. He informally founded the "Milan group", the first nucleus of the Italian school of neuropsychology. Among the members of the group, first and foremost were the neurologist Luigi A. Vignolo (1934-2010), who had been trained in Paris before returning to Italy, and the psychologist...