In 1909 Guglielmo Marconi was the first Italian to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics. Even though he was still young - Marconi was 35 - the prize came at the end of an extraordinarily intense period of work that had lasted almost 15 years, beginning in the laboratory of his family home - Villa Griffone, in the hills around Bologna - with his first experiments of wireless telegraphy. However, the theatre of his pioneering work in radio communications were the Atlantic coasts: Great Britain was a second home for Marconi as inventor but a first home for his career as entrepreneur, Ireland - where his mother Annie Jameson was from - hosted important stations for his first transatlantic connections. Canada and the United States saw triumphs of the young Italian visionary who between 1901 and 1903 managed, in the midst of polemics, scepticism and great wonder, to receive the first radiotelegraphic signals across the huge natural obstacle of the Atlantic Ocean... [more]