Update: This article has been translated into Italian.
On May 14, 2026, Nathaniel Mulcahy struggled to wake his mother, Gabriella Maria Piera Beatrice Bergamini Mulcahy. Nevertheless, since it was her 95th birthday, he proceeded to open a chilled bottle of Asti Spumante — a sweet Italian sparkling wine — that he had set aside for the celebration.
With the pop of the cork, Gabriella Mulcahy instantly arose.
“Che bella musica!” (“What beautiful music!”)
To Gabriella Mulcahy’s son, that moment, a week before she passed away from cancer on May 22, captures the joy she brought to life.
“She ate an industrial quantity of Swiss and Austrian chocolates and pastries, and when I brought out the sheet cake that I bought, she said ‘Che schifo,’ (‘Yuck,’) and pushed it aside — it wasn’t to her level,” Nathaniel Mulcahy said, “everything had to be creative and genuine and real.”
Gabriella Bergamini Mulcahy was an adjunct associate professor of botany at the University of Massachusetts for half a century and leaves behind a deep legacy as a petroleum engineer, an embryologist, a geneticist, an author and a poet. She is remembered as an excellent cook, a loving spouse, mother and grandmother by her husband David, her children Amy and Nathaniel, their spouses Stephen and Jessica and grandchildren Daniela, Juliana, Giuseppina and Federico.
She was born in Tortona, Italy, to Clelia Ciucci and Natale Bergamini in 1931. World War II played a defining role in her early years. After her father was captured and sent to a concentration camp, he managed to escape and return to his family, who then worked together to ensure he remained hidden. From a young age, Gabriella Mulcahy was surrounded by the terrors of war, but still managed to make the best of a horrific situation.
“Her childhood was protecting her dad from the Nazis, and she also collected and distributed the illegal propaganda from the partisans. People weren’t going to be suspicious of a nine-year-old, but a nine-year-old doing that is still a capital offense, so the Nazis would have killed her if she had been caught,” Nathaniel Mulcahy said. “Her childhood games were when the bombs fell, they’d all run out to see who would find the hottest piece of shrapnel.”
“(On the drilling towers)” Photo courtesy of Nathaniel Mulcahy.
Gabriella Mulcahy descended from a family of academia; her mother studied at the Sapienza University of Rome and her father was an inventor. She received her doctorate in embryology from the University of Genoa. Gabriella Mulcahy received a Fulbright Scholarship to pursue research in the United States, working as a petroleum engineer for Eni, one of the world’s largest integrated energy companies.
“[She] crossed the Atlantic to work [as] the only woman in a group of men in the petroleum field, quickly becoming an appreciated part of the team,” Teresa Gazzina Casazza, one of Gabriella Mulcahy’s closest friends, said in an email. “For sure, she would like to be remembered for this part of her life.”
She later met her husband of 64 years, David Mulcahy, in Berkeley, Calif., in 1960. After getting married, they spent years conducting research at various institutions around the country. Eventually, they settled in Amherst to work at UMass together, with David Mulcahy as a professor and researcher and Gabriella Mulchay as a researcher. They studied pollen biology, plant genetics and plant reproduction; their research transformed the scientific understanding of how flowering plants reproduce and the field of epigenetics.
“My dad had a lab, which kept growing, and at one point they had as many as 16 graduate students working in the lab on the third floor [of] Morrill Science Center,” Nathaniel Mulcahy said. “They had their desks side by side, they wouldn’t even want to be apart, even during the workday.”
Karen Searcy, a former lecturer in the UMass biology department and curator of the UMass Herbarium, was a teaching assistant for David Mulcahy and a researcher in his lab during her graduate studies, where she met Gabriella Mulcahy. The two became close friends, and Searcy emphasized the significance of Gabriella Mulcahy’s work in the lab.
“She actually was the one who did the pollinations and looked at the pollen tubes, so she was his hands in many ways,” Searcy said. “Of course, they discussed things together, so it was a little hard to say where one stopped and the other started, but she was very often, at least the years that I was there, the one who was physically more involved in the actual techniques of doing things.”
Together, David Mulcahy and Gabriella Mulcahy organized major international conferences and co-edited seminal scientific texts on the subject, including the book “Biotechnology and Ecology of Pollen,” which was published in 1986. Much of the couple’s theories on epigenetics were still novel in the field, but despite being met with pushback, they persevered.
“They held a symposium on Lake Garda [in Italy] back in ‘76, and I remember people laughing at her proposals, and how angry she was,” Nathaniel Mulcahy said. “She lived long enough to see that, yes, epigenetics exists, and she made a point of letting people know that she was happy to know that she was right.”
Searcy found inspiration in Gabriella Mulcahy’s presence as a woman working in the scientific field.
“It was still a little bit unusual for women to be involved in science,” Searcy said. “It’s changed, but at that time, for me, it was nice to see somebody being able to do those various things.”
Gabriella Mulcahy braided her scientific rigor with personal warmth. Within the laboratory setting, she ensured all students felt a sense of belonging. Her hospitality extended to her home, where she nurtured the scientific community with traditional Piedmontese dishes like agnolotti, or stuffed pasta, and fritto misto alla piemontese, or mixed fry.
“She was a mentor, a friend and a mother figure for a number of undergraduates that came through David’s lab,” Searcy said. “When we would have a seminar, she would make a crustada. She was the one who kept the lab spirit going in many ways.”
“I remember her home on Cosby Avenue, crowded with students, professors, friends of different nationalities, all welcomed with warmth and very good food, since she was an excellent cook,” Casazza said.
Whether inside or outside of the laboratory, Nathaniel Mulcahy believes that his mother’s motivation stemmed from her authenticity and creativity.
“That’s why she made such important discoveries. That’s why even when she made jam, she would spend hours using watercolors to make each jam label. She would paint a picture of a pear for each jar of jam using watercolors — that’s who she was,” Nathaniel Mulcahy said.
This deep compassion for life influenced every part of her existence, enabling her to extend it to others.
Photo courtesy of Nathaniel Mulcahy.
“We became friends very quickly, a friendship that lasted [more than fifty years], even if after a few years we were physically far away, but always close in spirit and thoughts,” Casazza said. “We kept corresponding, she loved to write, and her collections of poems are testimonial of her many gifts.”
Even as she grew older and her health weakened, she still maintained the same love for all those around her.
“She sparkled with life when she saw my dad,” Nathaniel Mulcahy said. “They had this amazing relationship when there was a full moon, even though she could barely walk, my dad would get her and the two of them would hobble to the front porch and look at the full moon.”
“She was funny, full of life, a lover of poetry, music and beautiful things,” Casazza said. “She was a very important part of my life, and I am grateful to have been her friend.”
According to Nathaniel Mulcahy, Tortona is characterized by a climate of persistent, thick fog lasting from mid-autumn through early spring. Gabriella Mulcahy’s ability to find beauty in existence is captured in her poem “Salita Costa Longarino”, leaving a trace of her immutable soul that will continue to live on in those privileged with her memory.
“For my mom, anytime she ended up in the fog, she felt like she was being embraced and enveloped in the memories of her past,” Nathaniel Mulcahy said. “It wasn’t cold and clammy, but welcoming and comforting.”
Photo courtesy of Nathaniel Mulcahy.
Bella Ishanyan can be reached at [email protected].
