Giordano

Giordano is a river turned into a person. Crusaders and pilgrims coming back from the Jordan carried flasks of its water home, and a child baptised in that water took the river's name, so the Holy Land entered an Italian family through a font in a parish church. The name travelled across Christian Europe behind the returning armies, held firmest in the south, and stayed a first name rather than a family one for centuries.

When Italian families began fixing hereditary names, the given name hardened into a surname and split into forms: the plural habit produced Giordani, and in Lombardy and Piedmont the Germanic-derived suffix -engo built Giordanengo on the same root. The most famous carrier of the word wore it in front rather than behind, the philosopher remembered as Giordano Bruno, whose story belongs to the Bruno name and not to this one.

Vitale Giordano was born at Bitonto, in the Kingdom of Naples, probably on 15 October 1633, and appears in print as Giordano Vitale, Vitale Giordano da Bitonto and Vitale Giordani. As an adolescent he left the city, or was made to leave it, after a violent youth that included killing his brother-in-law for calling him lazy, and he enlisted in the Pontifical army. It was in that soldiering life that he read his first book of mathematics, the Aritmetica prattica of Clavius.

At twenty-eight, living in Rome, he gave himself to mathematics entirely, working from Euclid's Elements in Commandino's Italian translation. He befriended Giovanni Borelli and Michelangelo Ricci, spent a year employed as a mathematician by the former Queen Christina of Sweden during her last stay in Rome, lectured at the French Academy in Rome from 1667, and took the chair of mathematics at the Sapienza in 1685.

His Euclide restituto answered Borelli's Euclides Restitutus of 1658. Borelli's proof of the parallel postulate rested on an assumption borrowed from Clavius, that a line everywhere equidistant from a straight line must itself be straight, which Clavius had tried and failed to prove in 1574. Using a figure out of Clavius, the shape now called a Saccheri quadrilateral, Giordano proved that if three points of one line are equidistant from another then every point of it is: the first real advance on the parallel postulate in six hundred years. When Leibniz passed through Rome in 1689 to 1690 the two men met, and Giordano gave him the second edition of the book. He died on 3 November 1711.

Most lines carrying a baptismal surname cannot be traced far, but one Sicilian household can. The Giordano family had been settled at Lercara Friddi since the early eighteenth century, when Giovanni Giordano and his wife Angiola Lummina of Siracusa arrived in the town, and the family is still there. By the nineteenth century they were established enough that Giuseppe Giordano (1803 to 1883), a doctor, sat as one of the decurioni, the town's municipal administrators, from 1836 to 1840.

Giuseppe's fourth child, Alfonso Maria Giordano, was born on 11 January 1843 to him and Donna Anna Miceli (1807 to 1887), a noblewoman of another well-established Lercarese family. The name kept working in the professions after him: his grandson Alfonso (1910 to 1990) was a doctor and a professor at the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, and another grandson, also Alfonso (1928 to 2021), was the judge who presided over the Maxi Trial.

Alfonso Giordano practised medicine in his home town and had inherited sulfur mines from his father, which put him in daily contact with the men and boys who worked them. Rather than leave it there, he went to the University of Palermo to study mining hygiene, became the first Sicilian to hold a lectureship in the subject, and taught it for over a decade. Following Ramazzini, the physician of Carpi who had written on the diseases of workers, he denounced the skeletal deformities of the carusi, the children employed in the sulfur mines.

He discovered and described ankylostomiasis among the miners, a severe anaemia often fatal if undiagnosed, contracted through the habit of working barefoot underground, and argued for a second disease among the miners, caused by particles of the yellow mineral accumulating in the lung as coal dust did in the coal pits. He pressed for legal limits on mining labour, corresponded with Louis Pasteur and became his friend, and through Pasteur's intervention received an honorary degree in mining hygiene in Paris. He was twice mayor, and when he died on 15 July 1915 the miners put a plaque on the house where he was born.

Umberto Menotti Maria Giordano was born at Foggia in Apulia on 28 August 1867 and studied under Paolo Serrao at the Conservatoire of Naples. His first opera, Marina, was written for a competition run by the publishers Casa Sonzogno for the best one-act work, remembered today as the beginning of Italian verismo. Mascagni won it with Cavalleria rusticana; Giordano, the youngest entrant, came sixth out of seventy-three, and Marina drew interest enough for Sonzogno to commission a staged opera from him for the 1891 to 1892 season.

The result was Mala vita, about a labourer who vows to reform a prostitute if he is cured of his tuberculosis, which caused a scandal at the Teatro Argentina in Rome in February 1892 before playing successfully in Vienna, Prague and Berlin. Regina Diaz failed in 1894 and came off after two performances. Then he moved to Milan and put Andrea Chenier, drawn from the life of the French poet, on the stage of La Scala on 28 March 1896, and Fedora followed in 1898 with the rising young tenor Enrico Caruso in it. He died in Milan at eighty-one, and the principal theatre of Foggia carries his name.

Henry Luke Giordano was born in San Francisco on 10 June 1914 and took his degree at the UCSF School of Pharmacy in 1934, working behind a counter until 1941, when he joined the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. He left for the Coast Guard in 1943, came out in 1946 a specialist petty officer first class, returned to the Bureau and worked a good deal of it undercover. He was deputy commissioner from 1958, and was sworn in as commissioner by C. Douglas Dillon, the Secretary of the Treasury, on 17 August 1962.

In February 1968 President Johnson asked Congress to fold the Bureau into the Bureau of Drug Abuse Control; both houses agreed, the merged Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs took effect that April, and Giordano, the second and last commissioner the old Bureau ever had, stayed on as associate commissioner until it was absorbed into the Drug Enforcement Administration in 1973. A different Giordano held office on the other coast: William J. Giordano, born in Brooklyn on 8 August 1919 and practising law there, entered the New York State Assembly in February 1966, was returned three times, then resigned to win a seat in the State Senate in 1971.

Richard Joseph Giordano was born in Manhattan on 20 July 1932 to Josephine Labruzzi and Graziano 'Jack' Giordano, an only child, sickly, who spent much of his childhood in bed. His father brought him a copy of Famous Funnies and that settled it; by seven he was drawing his own stories on brown paper grocery bags. He began freelancing for Charlton Comics in 1952 on Westerns like Annie Oakley and Billy the Kid, and his Charlton work for Strange Suspense Stories became the source Roy Lichtenstein painted from for his Brushstroke series. By 1965 he was Charlton's executive editor, building the Action Hero line and bringing in Jim Aparo, Dennis O'Neil and Steve Skeates.

DC hired him in April 1968 at Steve Ditko's suggestion. He was best known as an inker, above all over Neal Adams's pencils on Batman and Green Lantern/Green Arrow. With Denny O'Neil he created the Batman character Leslie Thompkins in Detective Comics number 457 in March 1976. He left in 1971 to run the Continuity Associates studio with Adams, returned to DC in 1980, and was vice president and executive editor from 1983 until 1993, the years of Crisis on Infinite Earths, The Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen. He died on 27 March 2010, and the Hero Initiative named its Humanitarian of the Year Award after him.