The beginning of Edoardo Amaldi’s interest in gravitation experiments and in gravitational wave detection

Unedited documents and letters allowed to establish that Edoardo Amaldi’s first interests in experiments on gravitation date back to the late 1950s, about twelve years before the beginning of the research activity in gravitational wave (GW) detection in Rome (1970). Amaldi was connected to the main protagonists of the historical phenomenon that many historians call the Renaissance of General Relativity (GR), characterised by the new attitude of the scientific world towards Einstein’s theory of gravitation, which had its start in the middle of the 1950s and which grew along the 1960s, with the birth of relativistic astrophysics. Since the second half of the 1960s, Amaldi’s will of beginning an experimental activity for detecting gravitational radiation clearly emerges.