Maria Angela Ardinghelli

Of her they wrote: “woman of prodigious ingenuity” (Eugenio Comba in his Donne illustrious Italiane); “it is not possible to talk about physics without praising Maria Angela Ardinghelli who has made herself known since her early youth for her talents and culture” and again “Mademoiselle Ardinghelli is at the head of those illustrious women who in Italy are the glory of their sex” (Jerome De La Lande, French astronomer).
Born in Naples in 1728, from a noble family of Florentine origin, Maria Angela Ardinghelli received a literary education studying rhetoric, Latin and philosophy; she later devoted herself to scientific studies with some of the best scholars of the kingdom such as the physicist Giovanni Maria Della Torre and the mathematician Vito Caravelli. Maria Angela becomes an expert in mathematics, algebra and physics to such an extent that she is called to participate in the exclusive salon of Ferdinando Vincenzo Spinelli, Prince of Tarsia, who had created a laboratory of Newtonian physics and electricity in 1747.
The scientist Ardinghelli is a point of reference even beyond the borders of the Neapolitan city, a precious interlocutor included in the national and international cultural circuit of the eighteenth century. She plays a fundamental role in connecting the communities of Naples and Paris with her activity as a correspondent (the first woman!) at the Paris Academy of Sciences, thanks to the decades-long exchange of letters with Abbot Jean-Antoine Nollet, a leading exponent in the scientific society of the time, an experimental physicist, master of the royal princes of France. If the recurring argument is electricity, there is also no shortage of reflections and exchanges of opinion on natural and physical phenomena such as air and winds, volcanoes, Vesuvius. A scientist, physicist but also a translator, her hunger is linked to the arduous translations of the works of the English botanist and physicist Stephen Hales, the greatest physicist in England, whose inaccurate calculations she corrected, demonstrating remarkable linguistic as well as scientific ability. From her position “at the head” of distinguished women she is clear about the weight of prejudice against women in the sciences, and, in a letter to the ambassador of France in Naples, de l'Hopital, she writes «I would be sorry, most excellent sir, for the many men, even learned men who foolishly (in my opinion) disapprove of scientific studies for women, if there were no other wiser and more judicious ones, who approve and praise them».