The Bologna team:
(from left to right) Francesco Ferraro, Giacomo Beccari,
Barbara Lanzoni, Flavio Fusi Pecci
Francesco Ferraro
Francesco R. Ferraro was first intrigued by Astronomy as a child. He was born in
1961 in a small town (Corsano, near Lecce) on the beautiful sea of Puglia
but he mostly grew up in Matera, a small
city in south of Italy, in the so-called ``Magna Grecia'' area, a region full of
ancient history of the Greek colonization. Naturally his initial main interest
was Archeology. While he was collaborating with an amateur Archeologist group,
there was an amateur astronomy group working next door to the Archeologists. The
curiosity which led him to look in at next door's meetings was fatal: after many
years of freezing nights spent following luminosity variability of nearby
variable stars, he started to study Astronomy at the Bologna University where he
earned a PhD degree in Astronomy. After a Post-Doc in Germany (at the European
Southern Observatory) he was researcher at the Bologna Observatory
and he is now full professor at the Astronomy Department
of the Bologna University.
Ferraro's principal field of investigation is the study of stellar evolution and
stellar population in old stellar systems. His astronomical work is based on
observations made with telescope on the Earth (mainly European Telescopes in
Chile) and in space (Hubble Space Telescope). Thus at the end he has finally
succeeded in reconciling both his passions indulging in an Astro-Archeology
approach to the problem of the formation and the evolution of our Galaxy, via
the systematic study of the oldest known fossils of that remote epoch: the
Galactic Globular Clusters. Since his initial hobby became his vocation, he has
turned his interest toward figurative art and currently enjoys painting.