Gian Vittorio Frigo (1939 – 2026)

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CERN has lost one of its most singular minds. Gian Vittorio Frigo – a pioneer of IT engineering, a practising guitarist, a meticulous cook and an endlessly generous host – has left us, and the world is a quieter and less colourful place for it. To those who knew him well, he was quite simply unlike anyone else.

A free and unconventional thinker, he inhabited a world of his own – creative, disruptive, stubborn and deeply artistic. As one colleague put it, he had a religion of perfection, and it was difficult to say no to him. He brought the same intensity to everything: reforming a management information system that had fallen into disarray, supporting Carlo Rubbia and his collaborators’ computing needs on the fifth floor of the Main Building, and the music he loved – flamenco, jazz, rock and sixties music. He was most memorable when he represented CERN on stage with his guitar at the 1992 Seville World Expo.

His friends will always remember the legendary garden parties he and his wife Barbara hosted each year in Nernier, which were as meticulously planned as they were generous. It was at one such gathering, on a warm summer’s evening by the lake, that he pointed out to one of us the house where Mary Shelley had worked on Frankenstein in 1816 – a detail that was, somehow, perfectly Vittorio. He brought poetry, music and good humour to the lives of his colleagues, which could always use a little more of each.

In recent years, he had been a much-loved regular of an informal lunch gathering of CERN alumni and friends – the “Académie”, as they called themselves – who came together each week over good food and conversation. His absence from that gathering will be deeply felt. Yet those who knew him take some comfort in his own words: in his final message, exchanged at Christmas, he said that he had had a very beautiful life. Knowing Vittorio, that was not resignation. It was a verdict, offered with his usual precision.

His friends in Italy remember him with a smile: always a beat ahead of the natural rhythm, always arriving before anyone else expected. A genio sregolato – a wayward genius – a myth of their youth. He lived, as he played, entirely on his own terms.

Ciao Vittorio. Rest in peace.

His colleagues and friends