Egypt Night: a new great discovery

S00 E01 • Friday, Jun 9, 1995 • Jun 9

Versailles - An evening with the Sun King

S00 E02 • Friday, Dec 18, 1998 • Dec 18 • 1h 30m

In this episode we will explore the world of the Sun King as if it were a distant planet where everything was different: medicine, technology, education, hygiene and daily life. Even nature was different: Europe at that time was still full of forests where deer, wild boars and wolves roamed. Hunting was a typical pastime of the king, Louis XIV set out every day on horseback with his squires to go and capture some game. He was a good eater at the table, but devouring all that game eventually gave him a deadly gout, which at a certain point degenerated into gangrene that led to his death.

Napoleon - The eight hours of Waterloo

S00 E03 • Friday, Feb 19, 1999 • Feb 19 • 1h 40m

Waterloo was Napoleon's last battle, marking his final disappearance from the scene and his exile on Saint Helena until his death. The Battle of Waterloo was one of the bloodiest events of the 19th century: it is estimated that the dead, missing and wounded were a total of 48,000, all of which took place in the space of a few hours, on a relatively small terrain and with a violence rarely seen.

Birthday party

S00 E04 • Friday, Jun 4, 1999 • Jun 4

The episode celebrates the 2000 episodes of Quark and all the programs derived from it.

Il grande viaggio di Marco Polo

S00 E05 • Tuesday, Oct 5, 1999 • Oct 5 • 1h 37m

In this episode we will retrace Marco Polo's journey, the journey he recounted in his famous book Il Milione. 15 thousand kilometers from Venice to Beijing, crossing deserts, steppes and very high mountains and back. We will understand what it meant to travel at that time in difficult territories, without roads, without the possibility of aid and resources, crossing much of the Middle East, crossing the Himalayas, to finally arrive in China.

Leonardo Da Vinci: ritratto di un genio (prima parte)

S00 E06 • Tuesday, Dec 28, 1999 • Dec 28

Our story begins in Vinci, not far from Florence, on April 15, 1452. It is the mid-1400s, a time of great intellectual fervor in Tuscany, Florence, Siena, Pisa, but also elsewhere in Italy. But Leonardo does not know all this, he lives in Vinci and attends the abacus school.

Leonardo Da Vinci: ritratto di un genio (seconda parte)

S00 E07 • Tuesday, Jan 4, 2000 • Jan 4

Cristoforo Colombo - Storia di un incredibile viaggio

S00 E08 • Friday, Mar 3, 2000 • Mar 3 • 1h 58m

In this episode we will follow step by step a truly extraordinary story: that of Christopher Columbus. A man who had an idea that was considered crazy at the time and made it happen. That is, reaching the East by passing through the West, crossing an immense and unknown ocean.

La straordinaria storia di Giuseppe Verdi

S00 E09 • Wednesday, Dec 13, 2000 • Dec 13 • 1h 58m

Giuseppe Verdi was not only a composer, but a man with an extraordinary life, a life that we will tell you about in this episode.

Odissea - Il fantastico viaggio di Ulisse (prima parte)

S00 E10 • Wednesday, Dec 27, 2000 • Dec 27 • 1h 37m

Odissea - Il fantastico viaggio di Ulisse (seconda parte)

S00 E11 • Wednesday, Jan 3, 2001 • Jan 3 • 1h 36m

Nove mesi - Come nasce la vita

S00 E12 • Wednesday, Jan 10, 2001 • Jan 10

Da zero a tre anni - Come nasce l'intelligenza

S00 E13 • Wednesday, Jan 17, 2001 • Jan 17

C'era una volta... cento anni fa

S00 E14 • Friday, Jan 26, 2001 • Jan 26

L'incredibile storia di Enrico Fermi

S00 E15 • Tuesday, Sep 18, 2001 • Sep 18 • 2h 9m

On the occasion of the centenary of his birth, in 2001, Superquark dedicated a special episode of the program to Enrico Fermi, in two parts. Mixing excerpts from films and documentary narration, the program retraces Fermi's origins and his studies that took him, very young, to the Scuola Normale di Pisa. It talks about the fertile period of "I ragazzi di Via Panisperna" in Rome when together with Rasetti, Amaldi, Segré, Majorana, D'Agostino and Pontecorvo he worked on reactions produced by atomic nuclei by the action of slow neutrons. Explores the group's relations with the fascist regime and the mysterious disappearance of Majorana; shows some laboratory instruments used by Fermi in the 1930s; talks about his departure for the USA, the awarding of the Nobel Prize in 1938 and the work of building the atomic pile, with the first nuclear chain reaction on 2 December 1942.

Umberto Nobile. La tenda rossa: SOS dal polo nord (prima parte)

S00 E16 • Wednesday, Dec 26, 2001 • Dec 26

Umberto Nobile. La tenda rossa: SOS dal polo nord (seconda parte)

S00 E17 • Wednesday, Jan 2, 2002 • Jan 2

Michelangelo - In compagnia di un genio (prima parte)

S00 E18 • Thursday, Dec 26, 2002 • Dec 26

Michelangelo - In compagnia di un genio (seconda parte)

S00 E19 • Thursday, Jan 2, 2003 • Jan 2

Giuseppe Garibaldi - Storia di un eroe (prima parte)

S00 E20 • Tuesday, Dec 9, 2003 • Dec 9 • 1h 49m

Giuseppe Garibaldi, a name that immediately evokes 100 images, memories and sensations. We all met him for the first time in school books with his strange cap and poncho.

Giuseppe Garibaldi. Storia di un eroe (seconda parte)

S00 E21 • Wednesday, Dec 10, 2003 • Dec 10 • 2h 1m

In this episode, our journey continues alongside Giuseppe Garibaldi, this extraordinary character who, after fighting for the ideals of freedom and equality in South America, finally manages to return to his homeland after a long exile and puts his passion at the service of Italian unity.

Luigi XVI - L'ultimo giorno

S00 E22 • Tuesday, Dec 16, 2003 • Dec 16

La vera storia della principessa Sissi

S00 E23 • Tuesday, Dec 23, 2003 • Dec 23

Mozart - La storia di una vita

S00 E24 • Tuesday, Dec 30, 2003 • Dec 30

Nella terra dei faraoni - La battaglia di Megiddo

S00 E25 • Wednesday, Dec 8, 2004 • Dec 8 • 1h 52m

Nella terra dei faraoni - Ladri di tombe

S00 E26 • Wednesday, Dec 15, 2004 • Dec 15 • 1h 36m

Colosseo - L'arena dei gladiatori

S00 E27 • Wednesday, Dec 22, 2004 • Dec 22

Pompei - Cronaca di una fine

S00 E28 • Wednesday, Dec 29, 2004 • Dec 29

Carlo Magno - La corona e la spada

S00 E29 • Wednesday, Dec 14, 2005 • Dec 14 • 2h 4m

Gengis Khan - Il cavaliere dell'Apocalisse

S00 E30 • Wednesday, Dec 21, 2005 • Dec 21 • 1h 56m

Demon and divinity. This is how Genghis Khan, the ruthless leader of the Mongols and ruler of the largest empire ever governed by a single man, was considered in the Middle Ages. Accurate historical reenactments, enhanced with computer graphics and cutting-edge compositing techniques, form the essence of a documentary that uses not only archaeology at spectacular ancient sites, but also the traces of ancient Mongolian culture left in the present.

Napoleone: seguendo la Grande Armata

S00 E31 • Wednesday, Dec 28, 2005 • Dec 28 • 1h 39m

This episode of the Speciali Superquark is dedicated to the most famous and celebrated of leaders: Napoleon Bonaparte. After the great enthusiasm and bloodbaths of the French Revolution, a Corsican general, Napoleon, appears first on the military scene and then on the scene of the great powerful people of the earth, whose action will have a profound impact on the history of modern Europe. Piero Angela retraces his story starting from the moment of the coup d'état, but above all following the events of the "Grande Armèe", Napoleon's great army, which for almost twenty years crossed the most diverse fronts: from Austria to Italy, from Prussia to Spain, from Egypt to Russia. There is no shortage of intrigues that surrounded him and his family, and his great loves. The images of the beautiful drama co-produced by Rai in 2002, directed by Yves Simoneau, bring the power of his story to life.

Chernobyl - Nel buio degli anni luce

S00 E32 • Wednesday, Apr 19, 2006 • Apr 19 • 2h 5m

Twenty years after the Chernobyl tragedy, Piero Angela and a crew from Superquark have produced a special dedicated to those places that are still isolated for a radius of 30 km. The nuclear reactor, which exploded on the night of April 26, 1986, is not yet turned off: the melted fuel is still incandescent. The emergency cover has cracks, and there are fears of a collapse if nothing is done soon. The Superquark crew went to the sites of the disaster: to the nuclear power plant and to the ghost town of Prypiat, hastily abandoned by its inhabitants and left as it was at the time. An English fiction will reconstruct with actors what happened that night in the control room, and all the lies that followed in the following 36 hours. With Paco Lanciano and with the help of models Piero Angela will explain why the reactor exploded.

L'uomo che creò la Cina

S00 E33 • Thursday, Dec 21, 2006 • Dec 21

La vera storia del pirata Barbanera

S00 E34 • Wednesday, Dec 27, 2006 • Dec 27

Augusto - Nascita di un Impero

S00 E35 • Wednesday, Jan 3, 2007 • Jan 3 • 1h 58m

Imperial Rome. An expanding city made of large squares, palaces, marble, aqueducts, temples. After many years of war, Rome discovered itself to be an enormous and powerful city, the head of all peoples. It was led by a single man: his name was Gaius Julius Caesar Octavian, they called him Augustus, that is, the consecrated one. It was Augustus who brought peace to the chaos and made Rome the center of the universe, creating a center of power that represented the model for the 79 emperors who succeeded him over the course of the following four centuries.

Elisabetta I - Una donna per un grande regno

S00 E36 • Wednesday, Dec 19, 2007 • Dec 19

Madame de Pompadour - Amore e potere

S00 E37 • Wednesday, Dec 26, 2007 • Dec 26

La vera storia di Mata Hari

S00 E38 • Wednesday, Jan 2, 2008 • Jan 2 • 1h 57m

Dancer, adventurer, femme fatale and above all secret agent, intriguing and mysterious spy. Her name is Mata Hari. A character capable of throwing Europe into turmoil in the years between the Belle Epoque and the First World War. Margareta Geertruida Zelle, this is her real name, was born in Holland in 1876. As a young woman, after a marriage that ended badly, she moved to Paris. She worked as a model, a horsewoman and improvised as a dancer, taking advantage of the interest and success of exotic dances among the French public. And she became, at the beginning of the twentieth century, an international star, who made men all over Europe lose their heads.

Il paese senza figli

S00 E39 • Monday, Jun 23, 2008 • Jun 23

The structure of the Italian population, demographers say, is becoming profoundly unbalanced, as never before in our history: on one side the collapse of births, on the other the dizzying increase in the elderly. In the middle, the drastic reduction of that age group that produces income. The data are eloquent: each couple, today, generates on average little more than one child: at this rate each generation is almost halved and the young people in Italy will be reduced to a flicker. Meanwhile, the elderly have doubled, in the last 50 years, and the over-eighties have quadrupled. This completely new situation will have repercussions in every field: pensions, healthcare, assistance, and of course immigration. UN projections predict that in 2050 (when today's newborns will be 42 years old) there will be 10 million immigrants in Italy.

Cercatori di tesori - Egitto: l'avventura della scoperta

S00 E40 • Tuesday, Dec 23, 2008 • Dec 23

Cercatori di tesori - Schliemann-La scoperta di Troia

S00 E41 • Tuesday, Dec 30, 2008 • Dec 30 • 2h 2m

Cercatori di tesori - L'oro di Cortes

S00 E42 • Wednesday, Jan 7, 2009 • Jan 7

Nel segno del comando: Nerone, cronache da un Impero

S00 E43 • Wednesday, Dec 23, 2009 • Dec 23

Nel segno del comando: Attila, il cavallo e la spada

S00 E44 • Wednesday, Dec 30, 2009 • Dec 30 • 1h 36m

Attila king of the Huns. Of the barbarians who pressed at the gates of the empire, undoubtedly the most famous. At the head of an army composed of heterogeneous tribes, he challenged the Roman Empire, now close to disintegration, and divided between Ravenna and Constantinople, devastating the Europe of the time far and wide, even reaching Italy. With his death, his empire also disappeared. Also for Attila, the story continues thanks to a drama, this time from the BBC series Warriors. In the studio, Prof. Alessandro Barbero, consultant for the episode. The external shots, in addition to the Budapest Museums, which preserve traces of the skulls and gold of the Huns, were made in Istanbul, the ancient Constantinople. On its ancient walls and in the incredible underground cisterns full of decorated columns. Alberto Angela visited Aquileia, an important city of the Roman Empire, hit by the fury of Attila, where beautiful mosaics are still visible.

Nel segno del comando: Shogun il grande samurai

S00 E45 • Tuesday, Jan 5, 2010 • Jan 5 • 1h 36m

Shogun is the story of the Great Samurai who in 1600 reunified Japan, then divided into a myriad of clans, becoming the undisputed leader of the country, after the bloody battle of Sekigahara. His name was Ieyasu Tokugawa, and his descendants would inherit this absolute power until the last decades of the 19th century, when Japan emerged from its long isolation and opened up to the modern world. The Speciali SuperQuark went to various ancient cities of Japan to tell this story, using the fiction produced by the BBC on the life of the famous Samurai. Alberto Angela followed the construction of a katana, the famous samurai sword, made by one of the very few craftsmen able to replicate the ancient procedures. In the studio, Prof. Franco Mazzei will talk about the influence of what has been defined as the "Japanese Middle Ages" on the traditions and values ​​of today's Japan.

Dopo l'Islanda: cosa bolle sottoterra?

S00 E46 • Thursday, Jun 10, 2010 • Jun 10

SuperQuark, the most popular television magazine on science, nature and technology, created and hosted by Piero Angela, opens the season with a special episode, "After Iceland: what's boiling under the ground?" entirely dedicated to volcanoes. The program opens with an analysis of the current situation in Iceland. A team from SuperQuark and correspondent Cristiano Barbarossa will take stock of the eruption and its consequences. Lorenzo Pinna will instead explain the vulnerability of complex systems and also the difficulties of defending oneself from phenomena of this size. It will also be an opportunity to delve deeper, with Alberto Angela, into the events that accompanied the historic eruptions of Vesuvius and Etna as well as the great African volcanoes, which created extraordinary landscapes, not just destruction.

In Africa, sulle tracce di Livingstone

S00 E47 • Thursday, Dec 23, 2010 • Dec 23

The first episode of this year's Speciali Superquark deals with a character who has become legendary: David Livingstone, an English missionary, doctor and explorer who, in the second half of the 19th century, left for Africa in search of the source of the Nile. It may seem like an original and slightly crazy idea, but many had it at the time, such as Burton and Speke, who were also funded by the Royal Geographical Society. But perhaps the thing that everyone remembers most is the famous phrase that, with a typically British imperturbability, journalist Henry Stanley uttered when he found Livingstone in Ujiji near Lake Tanganyika after eight months of searching across half of Africa: "Dr. Livingstone, I presume". In Africa, Livingstone is a legendary figure, especially for his fight against the slave trade. Places named in his memory can be found in almost every African country.

Shackleton, l'eroe dell'Antartide

S00 E48 • Thursday, Dec 30, 2010 • Dec 30

The second episode of the Speciali Superquark deals with one of the most incredible feats in the history of exploration. It is the story of Ernest Henry Shackleton and his men, who left England in August 1914 to make the first crossing of Antarctica on foot. But the ship Endurance was trapped by ice and sank. Then Shackleton carried out a desperate feat that has now become legend: he left most of the men in a sort of camp on the ice and set off with a lifeboat and 5 other men in the direction of South Georgia, a dot in the ocean. Fighting against ocean waves, storms and deadly winds, he managed to land, but the island had high mountains and glaciers. He left three more men in another camp and climbed the mountains with two companions, reaching a whaling base. From there, the rescue operations began, which failed twice. On the third attempt, 2 years and 10 months after leaving, Shackleton will save all his men, welcomed as a hero in his homeland!

L'incredibile storia di Antonio Meucci

S00 E49 • Monday, Jan 3, 2011 • Jan 3

The third episode of the Speciali Superquark deals with the story of a brilliant man, creator of many inventions and owner of 22 patents: a new type of paper for printing, a smokeless kerosene lamp, fizzy fruit drinks, etc. A man who dreamed of running words on an electric wire to communicate at a distance, an invention that opened up boundless worlds with unforeseen repercussions to this day: the telephone. The man was Antonio Meucci, a student at the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence, linked to the movements for the Unification of Italy. From Florence he emigrated with a theater company to Cuba, which at the time had one of the largest theaters in the world. After 15 years he left for the United States, a free land where everything was possible and to which exiles from half the world went.

30 anni di Superquark: un viaggio sorprendente

S00 E50 • Monday, Dec 19, 2011 • Dec 19