25 Facts About Piero Angela

Piero Angela started as a radio reporter, then became a foreign correspondent, and established himself as the host of the RAI newscast.

Piero Angela is best known as the creator and presenter of broadcasting programmes modelled on BBC and David Attenborough documentaries, to whom he has been often compared, and for his scientific journalism published in numerous publications.

Piero Angela was born in Turin, the son of Nella Maglia and Carlo Piero Angela, an anti-fascist doctor, who was awarded the Medal of the Righteous Among the Nations on 29 August 2001.

At the age of one, Piero Angela nearly died from pneumonia.

Piero Angela wrote that rationality was taught to him by his father.

Piero Angela did well in almost all studies, but he did the minimum of work required.

Piero Angela said he received "a very Piedmontese education: very rigid, with very strict principles, including that of diffidence, never exhibiting".

Piero Angela began taking private piano lessons when he was seven years old; he later developed an interest in jazz music.

Piero Angela played at this time with Franco Cerri, with whom in 1946, they would ride their bicycles to hear the concerts from outside of a Turin restaurant because they were unable to buy tickets.

Piero Angela has spent nine years in Paris, four years in Brussels as a correspondent and toured America as a correspondent for RAI.

Piero Angela had an audio recording of the birth of his two children.

Piero Angela wrote 33 books which have sold over three million copies, received many honorary degrees, made about sixty documentaries and hundreds of television episodes, and won seven Telegacts and eight times the National Television Directing Award.

In 1984 Piero Angela produced Pillole di Quark, a thirty-second spot on technical, scientific, educational, social, and medical topics, which was broadcast at variable times on Rai 1.

That same year are the Speciale Superquark, monothematic evenings on subjects of great social, psychological and scientific interest, and the collaboration in the television programme Domenica in, in which Piero Angela was the anchor of a space dedicated to culture.

Parallel to the popularising activity on television, Piero Angela has carried out publishing activities, always with information content.

Piero Angela has long been the editor of the Scienza e societa column in the weekly TV series TV Sorrisi e Canzoni.

Piero Angela was the founder and supervisor of the monthly magazine Quark, which he founded in 2001 and dissolved in 2006 due to lack of funds.

Piero Angela is the author of over thirty books, many of them translated into English, German and Spanish, with a total circulation of over three million copies.

In 1989, Piero Angela was one of the founders of CICAP, a scientific committee to promote scientific education and critical thinking and devoted to verification of allegedly scientific disciplines such as parapsychology.

In 2000, Piero Angela was sued for defamation by two homeopathic associations, following the broadcast of Superquark of 11 July 2000 in which the homeopathic medicine was said to have no scientific foundation.

Piero Angela, defended by lawyers Giulia Bongiorno and Franco Coppi, was acquitted in both cases and the judge recognized the unscientific nature of the discipline.

Piero Angela has written a large number of popular books, starting with L'uomo e la marionetta in 1972.

On religions and deities, Piero Angela had an agnostic approach and considered death a "nuisance".

On 13 August 2022, Piero Angela died in Rome at the age of 93, after a long illness.

Piero Angela's death was announced on social media by his son Alberto.