Franco Dino Rasetti (born 10.08. 1901) —an Italian experimental physicist and palaeontologist, a member of the Accademia dei Lincei (1937). He was born in Castiglione del Lago. He graduated from the University of Pisa (1922). In 1923-26 he worked at the University of Florence, and in 1927—39 at the University of Rome (from 1930 as head of the department of spectroscopy). In 1939 —47 he was professor at Laval University in Quebec (Canada), and in 1947 —67 at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore (USA).
His work was in atomic and nuclear spectroscopy, nuclear physics and cosmic-ray physics. He was a close collaborator of E. Fermi in the Italian period of Fermi's research on neutron physics and took part in the discovery of the slowing down of neutrons in matter (1934). He found the statistics of the nitrogen nucleus. In 1941 he recorded the decay of stopped mesons and measured the lifetime of a meson at rest. He developed a technique for growing large single crystals of bismuth.
The C. Matteucci (1931) and A. Righi (1932) prizes and others.