Season 5

This episode will be dedicated to the evolution of weapons from prehistory to the present day. From the stick to the bow, from the arrow to the rocket, from the sword to the rifle, from the Greek shield to smart rockets, weapons tell the story of the art of attack and defense. Alberto Angela will present spectacular pieces preserved at the Stibbert Museum in Florence and at the Historical Museum of the Artillery in Turin. Thanks to the collaboration of the Carabinieri, we will relive the sensations of a galloping cavalry charge.

This episode is very particular, very different from all the others. We will try to explore the world in its incredible diversity and observe what women and men scattered in the most disparate corners of the planet have done during their day.

Alberto Angela will go to the Louvre Museum, where we will have the opportunity to admire the most important pieces of the collections, paintings, statues and archaeological finds of ancient civilisations. We will tell the extraordinary story of this palace which from an ancient fortress became, over the centuries, the symbol of the power of the kings of France. The episode of Ulisse will open with the brand new arrangement in the Grand Gallery of the best-known painting in the world: the Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci.

Rome at the time of Nerone, before and after the famous fire. In this episode we will explore Rome before the fire, following two firefighters of the time: through their patrols, their personal stories and their interventions, we will reveal the environments and atmospheres of the life of the Romans of the time.

Rome at the time of Nerone, before and after the famous fire. In this episode we will talk about the fire, trying to understand why it broke out, the exact point from which it started and why it spread so quickly.

In the first episode we will try to understand how the decision to drop the bomb on Hiroshima was reached, retracing the steps from 1943, the year in which the best minds in physics, such as Oppenheimer and Fermi, gathered at Los Alamos to test the first bomb. The experiment was successful and, during a summit meeting between Truman, Churchill and Stalin, the idea of using this new bomb against Japan began to spread. We will follow with Alberto Angela all the phases of the complex operation, from the preparation to the transport of the atomic bomb to the Tinian base, from where the mission to Hiroshima departed; at the same time we will also follow the advance of the Americans in the Pacific which was the scene of ferocious fighting between sea and sky.

The story will continue in the second episode with the events immediately following the explosion. In that mushroom that rises there are the bodies of at least thirty thousand people. Within a radius of 2.5 km another fifty thousand will die in the space of a few seconds. Those who were even further away will be hit by a wave of heat that does not kill, but burns savagely. In the following days, months and years, thousands and thousands more people will die as a result of radiation. We will also find out what happened on the plane, which was hit head-on by the shock wave caused by the explosion. Through archive images we will follow the reactions of Japan and the whole world to the spread of the news and President Truman's speech to the nation on what happened and his motivations. Meanwhile, at the Tinian base, preparations continue for the new mission which will lead to the dropping of another bomb on Nagasaki on 9 August 1945.

In this episode of Ulisse we will literally travel through time. In fact, the entire course of our life is regulated by an infinite number of clocks, not only those that tell us what time it is, but also those that mark our entire working day, appointments, train departures and more. In fact, we live immersed in an ocean of other types of clocks, often invisible, but which follow us continuously: they are those clocks that regulate what exists within us and around us, from our cells to the cosmos.