the basis of other general considerations[@Schein_et_al1941; @Swann1941a; @Swann1941b]. After the war, in 1946, Cocconi was assigned a chair at the University of Catania, and he brought there his cosmic-ray experiments. Then he left for New-York, where he started working at Cornell University in 1947.

In the meanwhile, at the end of the war, a new group of young physicists started carrying out researches on cosmic rays in Milan: the group was composed by Giorgio Salvini, Antonino Mura and Guido Tagliaferri, who were later joined by Antonio Lovati.

Cosmic rays after World War II: the rebirth of Italian physics
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“A disaster”. With this single word, Italian scientists described the condition of Italian physics at the end of WWII. Many Italian physicists – like Fermi, Rossi, Pontecorvo and Occhialini – had left thecountry for political reasons. Some of the physics institutes – Pisa and Palermo for instance – had been severely bombed, and in several places the scientific apparatus had been stolen or damaged. Finally, many physicists had been involved in the war, and scientific activity had almost completely stopped, even in the places, like Padua, which had not been damaged. At the end of the war, scientists started coming back from the war experience, but they knew nothing about the recent results and techniques. Moreover, the funds for scientific activity were very poor. Nicolò Dallaporta, who had been invited to work in Padua by Antonio Rostagni – the new professor of experimental physics after Rossi’s departure – describes the life in the first post-war years in Padua with these