Fano's last Fano (Q6189748)

The title of the paper is the name that the authors like to use for a \(3\)-fold \(X\) of degree 22 in the projective space \(\mathbb P^{13}\) with canonical curve sections constructed by Fano in his last published paper [\textit{G. Fano}, Atti Accad. Naz. Lincei, VIII. Ser., Rend., Cl. Sci. Fis. Mat. Nat. 6, 151--156 (1949; Zbl 0034.24502)]. It appears as a general hyperplane section of the \(4\)-dimensional subvariety \(M\) of the Grassmannian \(\mathbb G(1,5) \subset \mathbb P^{14}\) parameterizing the chords of a general rational normal scroll of degree \(4\) in \(\mathbb P^5\). As the authors observe, Fano's paper was almost never quoted after its publication and it has been long time ignored by most modern mathematicians, probably also due to an inaccurate quote of Roth in his book on algebraic threefolds, mentioning only the \(4\)-fold \(M\). First the authors report on Fano's construction providing various proofs that were missing in their opinion: this is done in modern language but trying to use results and techniques available at the time of Fano, in order to support the correctedness of his paper. Next they reproduce Fano's construction of \(M\) with modern tools, by replacing the variety of chords of the rational scroll with the Hilbert scheme of \(0\)-dimensional subschemes of length 2 of \(\mathbb P^1 \times \mathbb P^1\). This finally allows them to describe \(M\) as the blow-up of a smooth hyperquadric of \(\mathbb P^5\) along a smooth conic non contained in any of its planes, and consequently to recognize \(X\) as the blow-up of the complete intersection of two quadrics in \(\mathbb P^5\) along a conic, one of the cases listed in the Mori-Mukai classification of Fano \(3\)-folds with Picard number \(\geq 2\) [\textit{S. Mori} and \textit{S. Mukai}, Manuscr. Math. 36, 147--162 (1981; Zbl 0478.14033)].