Anna Maria Ciccone, or Mariannina Corradina Ciccone, was an Italian physicist. From Sicily to Pisa Maria Anna or Mariannina Corradina Ciccone was born on 29 August 1892 (or 1891 according to different documents) in Noto, Sicily, of Corrado, a rich trader, and Caterina Mirmina. She got her diploma from Regia Scuola Normale (which will later become known as Istituto Magistrale) in 1910. Since her diploma did not allow her to attend specific faculties, Mariannina signed up at the Istituto Tecnico Archimede in the third year, in Modica, in a Physics-Mathematics class where she was the only female student in the class. After the first year in the Maths faculty at Rome university, she moved to Pisa, where she graduated with high marks, and where she got a second degree in Physics in 1924. The following year she was appointed Assistant Professor at the University of Pisa Physics Institute, then she became Full Assistant and from 1931 Co-Assistant, on the proposal of the principal of Luigi Puccianti's Physics Institute. In 1936 she became adjunct professor in Experimental Physics. In the same year she started a period at the Darmstadt’s Physics Institute in the Engineering school of Darmstadt in Germany, cooperating in spectroscopy research with her teacher Gerhard Herzberg, an anti-Nazi scientist and future Chemistry Nobel Prize winner in 1971. Her teaching career highlights her full dedication to work. Her activity was entirely focused on her scientific studies in the Physics Institute, so that she even moved her residence to the same building. She started publishing her first papers in Il Nuovo Cimento and in Memorie della società toscana di Scienze Naturali: two articles which would lead to more complex texts in the future. In 1939 she obtained the chair of spectroscopy that she maintained until retirement; between 1943 and 1948 she kept on the active teaching of physics and of maths since she was the only teacher to remain in service. The German attack to the University Ciccone, one of the first women graduated in maths and physics from Pisa university, deputy manager of the institute, dared to face German troops, then occupying Italy (Operation Achse), hence avoiding the total destruction of the building and the total removal of the instruments and the library. Between the end of June and the beginning of July 1944, a wing of the already plundered and mined building of the Institute of Physics situated in