Naples to Palermo, 25 March 1938: the disappearance of Ettore Majorana

On the late afternoon of Friday, 25 March 1938, the 31-year-old theoretical physicist Ettore Majorana left at the Institute of Physics in Naples an envelope for its director, Antonio Carrelli, and a second envelope in his hotel room for his family. The note to Carrelli opened: “Caro Carrelli, ho preso una decisione che era oramai inevitabile. Non vi è in essa un solo granello di egoismo; ma mi rendo conto del fastidio che la mia improvvisa scomparsa potrà arrecare a te e agli studenti.” (“Dear Carrelli, I have made a decision that has by now become inevitable. There is not a single speck of selfishness in it; but I am aware of the trouble my sudden disappearance may cause you and the students.”) The family note contained the line that he would hold an affectionate memory of them all “at least until eleven o’clock this evening, and possibly beyond.” At 22:30 he boarded an overnight Tirrenia steamer and sailed for Palermo.

The next day, from the Grand Hotel Sole in Palermo, he posted a telegram and a second letter on hotel letterhead. That letter reads, in essential part: “Spero che telegramma e lettera ti siano arrivati insieme. Il mare mi ha rifiutato e ritornerò domani all’Albergo Bologna, forse insieme con questa lettera. Ho però intenzione di rinunziare all’insegnamento. Non mi prendere per una ragazza ibseniana, perché il caso è differente.” (“I hope the telegram and letter have reached you together. The sea has rejected me and I will return tomorrow to the Albergo Bologna, perhaps together with this letter. I do intend, however, to give up teaching. Do not take me for an Ibsenian girl, because the case is different.”) He bought a return ticket and that evening boarded the Tirrenia steamer back to Naples. The crossing docked on Sunday morning, 27 March. On 28 March he did not appear at the institute. He was never positively identified again.

The two letters, posted within twenty-four hours of each other, are the spine of the case. The first reads as a farewell. The second retracts it. Eighty-eight years on, no record has resolved the contradiction. We keep three things separate, as always: what is documented, what the evidence shows, and what is only hypothesis.

The documented account

Ettore Majorana was born on 5 August 1906 in Catania, Sicily, the fourth of five children in a prominent Sicilian family. His uncle Quirino Majorana was a physicist. From 1928 he worked in Enrico Fermi’s group at the Institute of Physics in Via Panisperna in Rome, the Via Panisperna boys, alongside Amaldi, Rasetti, Segrè, and Pontecorvo. He took his laurea in theoretical physics in 1929.

His output was small and original. A 1932 paper introduced an infinite-component relativistic wave equation; another that year on neutron-proton exchange forces anticipated part of Heisenberg’s nuclear model. In early 1933 he spent several months in Leipzig with Heisenberg, then briefly in Copenhagen with Bohr. After his return to Italy he largely withdrew from academic life until 1937. His last paper, “Teoria simmetrica dell’elettrone e del positrone,” in Il Nuovo Cimento in 1937, introduced what is now called the Majorana equation and the concept that a neutral fermion can be its own antiparticle. The Majorana fermion is an active object of work in modern physics.

In late 1937 a competition board chaired by Fermi recommended his appointment to a chair of theoretical physics “per chiara fama,” for repute, independent of the standard competition. He was assigned to the University of Naples in November 1937 and gave his first lecture on 13 January 1938. The institute director was Antonio Carrelli. From February 1938 Majorana lived at the Albergo Bologna.

On the morning of 25 March 1938 he went to his Naples bank and withdrew the salary that had accumulated since his appointment, reported in the documentary literature as several months of back pay; no specific figure is reliably attested in the published file. He collected his passport. In the late afternoon he delivered the envelope for Carrelli at the institute, then stopped at the office of Gilda Senatore, a research student in the department, and left with her a folder of unpublished teaching notes that pre-dated the disappearance. At 22:30 he boarded a Tirrenia overnight steamer at the Naples maritime station. Italian secondary sources, citing Recami’s documentary collection, name the ship the Città di Palermo; the Tirrenia ledger has not been opened here.

The steamer docked in Palermo on the morning of Saturday, 26 March. Majorana checked into the Grand Hotel Sole on Via Vittorio Emanuele, sent Carrelli the telegram and the second letter, bought a return ticket, and boarded the Tirrenia steamer for Naples that evening. The crossing reached Naples on the morning of Sunday, 27 March 1938. On 28 March he did not appear at the institute.

One witness, Vittorio Strazzeri, professor of geology at the University of Palermo, told investigators that on the return crossing he had shared a second-class cabin with a young man matching Majorana’s description, and that the cabin-mate had disembarked at Naples. A sailor gave a similar account. Both men knew Majorana only from press photographs published after the disappearance, and the identification has been treated cautiously in the historiography.

Majorana’s brother Salvatore reported the disappearance within days. The investigation was conducted by the Royal Carabinieri and by the Pubblica Sicurezza under the national police chief Arturo Bocchini, with the Tirrenia company providing crew witnesses. The family offered a 30,000-lire reward. On 27 July 1938 Enrico Fermi wrote personally to Benito Mussolini asking for an exceptional effort by the search apparatus, on the grounds that of all the scholars he had met, Majorana was the only one whose depth he had not been able to comprehend; the wording is the form reported in the Recami collection and is not quoted here verbatim. The Pubblica Sicurezza file closed in 1938 without a positive determination.

Through 1938 and after, the family pursued searches at religious houses in southern Italy, prominently the Certosa di Serra San Bruno in Calabria, where a monk’s testimony recorded by the family indicated that a stranger had asked about taking holy orders in the spring of 1938. No identification was made.

The evidence

The record is unusually documentary for a missing-person case and unusually thin on everything else. There is no body, no luggage of consequence, and no scientific notebook from the period of disappearance ever positively identified.

The four 1938 communications. The note to Carrelli dated 25 March, the note to his family dated 25 March, the telegram from Palermo dated 26 March, and the second letter from the Grand Hotel Sole dated 26 March. Originals and family copies are reproduced in Erasmo Recami’s Il caso Majorana: epistolario, documenti, testimonianze, first published by Mondadori in 1987 and reissued by Di Renzo Editore through 2011. The Recami collection is the standard published source. The two letters to Carrelli are load-bearing: they are the case’s central contradiction.

The Pubblica Sicurezza and Carabinieri files of 1938. Held at the Archivio Centrale dello Stato in Rome under the Ministero dell’Interno, Direzione Generale della Pubblica Sicurezza. The file closed in 1938 without a positive determination. Archival reference at the busta and fascicolo level is not given in published summaries.

Fermi’s letter to Mussolini of 27 July 1938. Published in the Recami collection and attributed here to that collection rather than quoted from the original.

The Strazzeri and sailor witness statements. Both witnesses identified the cabin-mate from press photographs published after the disappearance. The historiography treats the identification cautiously.

The Buenos Aires and Caracas photograph dated 12 June 1955. A photograph of Francesco Fasani, an Italian mechanic emigrated to Venezuela, seated beside a man Fasani later identified as “Signor Bini.” Fasani told the Rai 3 programme Chi l’ha visto?, broadcast in March 2008, that he had met “Bini” in Valencia, Venezuela. He also reported a 1920 postcard from Quirino Majorana found in “Bini’s” vehicle.

The 2008 to 2015 Procura di Roma file. Following the 2008 broadcast, the Roman public prosecutor’s office opened an inquiry, assigned to deputy prosecutor (procuratore aggiunto) Pierfilippo Laviani. In 2011 the RIS (Reparto Investigazioni Scientifiche) of the Carabinieri produced a photographic comparison between the 1955 image of “Bini” and known photographs of Majorana, his father Fabio, and his brother Luciano. Italian press accounts summarised the technical comparison as reporting “perfetta sovrapponibilità dei particolari anatomici” (“perfect superimposability of anatomical features”) across forehead, nose, cheekbones, chin, and ear, with about ten points of correspondence. The wording given here is the form carried in the press summary, not the technical report itself.

The 4 February 2015 decreto di archiviazione. Laviani’s filing stated that Majorana “era vivo, nel periodo 1955-1959, e si trovava volontariamente nella città venezuelana di Valencia,” and concluded that he had voluntarily expatriated. The Procura archiviazione is a prosecutorial closure, a decision to file the case without further investigation. It is not a judicial verdict. The identification rests on photographic feature-matching and on witness testimony collected almost half a century after the events. No Italian-born “Bini” of matching age and biography is documented in published Venezuelan civil records. No handwriting, voice, or biometric identification beyond the photographic comparison has been published.

The 2016 CICAP critique. Query Online, the journal of the Italian Committee for the Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, published a critical review of the Procura findings in September 2016. Its central point: a photographic similarity is not an identification, and the witnesses spoke fifty years after the fact.

The January 2025 Court of Rome decree of presumed death. Reported in secondary sources, formally fixing the date of disappearance as the legal date of death. Court and exact wording attributed here to those secondary accounts.

The theories

Everything below is hypothesis. None is established fact.

A: Suicide at sea on the night of 25 to 26 March 1938. The original reading taken by the family and by Carrelli, carried forward by Amaldi and Segrè in their memoirs. For: the 25 March letters; the cash and passport carried; the documented withdrawal from academic life 1933 to 1937. Against: the retracting 26 March letter from Palermo; the purchase of the return ticket; the Strazzeri testimony of a Naples-bound disembarkation; no body.

B: Voluntary withdrawal to a monastery. Fixed in Italian public memory by Leonardo Sciascia’s La scomparsa di Majorana (Einaudi, 1975), associated with the Certosa di Serra San Bruno. For: the family searches there; the monk’s testimony of a stranger asking about holy orders in spring 1938; Majorana’s religious formation; his confessor’s reported view that suicide was incompatible with his faith. Against: no positive identification at Serra San Bruno or any other house; geographically incompatible with hypothesis C if both are taken as true.

C: Voluntary expatriation to South America. The 2008 to 2015 Procura di Roma reading. Majorana left Italy under a new identity, surfaces in Argentina by the early 1950s, and is in Valencia, Venezuela, in 1955 to 1959 as “Bini.” For: the 1955 Fasani photograph; the 2011 RIS comparison; the 2015 archiviazione; the reported Quirino Majorana postcard in “Bini’s” possession. Against: photographic similarity is not identification; no civil record of an Italian-born “Bini” of matching biography has been produced; key witnesses spoke fifty years after the fact; the file is a prosecutorial closure, not a court verdict.

D: Foresight-driven withdrawal from nuclear physics. A motive-variant compatible with B or C. Majorana foresaw the military trajectory of the field and deliberately withdrew. For: his 1933 to 1937 isolation followed his Leipzig stay; family reported his unease about the field’s direction. Against: no surviving letter states this motive; the Hahn-Strassmann fission result was not published until December 1938, nine months on.

E: Recruitment by a state for secret war research. A fringe reading, mentioned for completeness. For: speculation only. Against: no documentary trace in any state archive; not advanced by serious historiography.

F: Murder or accident. For: the steamer environment, the cash carried, the absence of a body. Against: no inquiry finding of foul play; no motive identified; the retracting Palermo letter and the bought return ticket are hard to reconcile with random violence aboard a coastal ferry.

What remains unknown

Eighty-eight years on, the contradiction in Majorana’s own hand has not been resolved. The 25 March letter to Carrelli reads as a farewell. The 26 March letter from Palermo retracts it and announces a return. Between them sits a documented round trip on the Tirrenia route and a return ticket bought in Palermo. After that, the record empties.

The 1938 Pubblica Sicurezza file closed without a determination. Fermi’s letter to Mussolini did not produce one. The family searches produced a single testimony at Serra San Bruno and no identification. The 2008 broadcast of the 1955 photograph reopened the case in Rome; the 2011 RIS comparison and the 4 February 2015 archiviazione closed it again in the prosecutor’s reading. Query Online and other commentators have argued that a closure is not an identification: photographic similarity is not the same as a civil record of an Italian-born “Bini” in Valencia, and no such record has been produced. The January 2025 Court of Rome decree of presumed death is a legal instrument, not a finding of fact about manner, place, or date.

We will not tell you he stepped off the deck of the Naples-bound steamer on the night of 26 to 27 March 1938, because the Strazzeri witness places him at the Naples pier and no body was ever found. We will not tell you he was the man photographed in Valencia in June 1955, because the basis is photographic comparison and a witness speaking half a century after the alleged meeting, and the prosecutor’s reading is a closure, not a verdict. We will not tell you he ended his life in a Carthusian house, because no positive identification was ever made. We will not tell you what he meant by the second letter, because between the farewell and the retraction he left no third document.

What is in the record is this: on 25 March 1938, a 31-year-old theoretical physicist of unusual gift posted two letters that contradict each other, took a Tirrenia overnight steamer to Palermo, posted a third document that contradicted the first, took another steamer back, and from the morning of Sunday, 27 March 1938, was never positively identified again. The case is unsolved because Majorana’s own words contradict each other, and the record after that Sunday morning is empty.

Sources

Primary / primary-adjacent

The 1938 Pubblica Sicurezza file at the Archivio Centrale dello Stato in Rome, the original 2011 RIS Carabinieri technical report, the 4 February 2015 Procura di Roma archiviazione filing in its original form, and the January 2025 Court of Rome decree of presumed death were not consulted in their original form for this piece.