Primo Levi(1919 — 1987)

Primo Levi's first and most celebrated account of his deportation to Auschwitz. Written between 1945 and 1947, this sober and clear-eyed memoir is considered one of the founding texts of Holocaust literature and is studied in many school curricula around the world.

A sequel to 'If This Is a Man', this book recounts Primo Levi's nine-month journey across Europe to return to Italy after the liberation of Auschwitz. Winner of the 1963 Campiello Prize, it offers a perspective that is by turns tragic and picaresque on post-war Europe.

A collection of twenty-one autobiographical stories, each named after a chemical element from Mendeleev's periodic table. Hailed as a masterpiece by international critics, the book weaves together science, memory, and autobiography in an original and poetic way.

A novel centered on Faussone, a rigger of metal structures, through whom Primo Levi celebrates the value of work done well and the dignity of the craftsman. Winner of the 1979 Strega Prize, the book reveals a brighter, more optimistic side of his literary world.

A historical novel following a band of Soviet Jewish partisans as they make their way across war-torn Europe toward Palestine. Primo Levi's first work of fiction, it tackles the question of Jewish resistance — a subject often overlooked in collective memory.

Primo Levi's last published book, an intellectual and moral testament on the memory of the Holocaust. In it, he develops his seminal concept of the 'grey zone' — the ambiguous space where victims and perpetrators sometimes found themselves bound by complex relationships that ordinary moral judgment cannot fully assess.

You who live safe in your warm houses, you who find on returning in the evening warm food and friendly faces: consider if this is a man who toils in the mud, who does not know peace, who fights for a crust of bread, who dies at a yes or a no.

Now, for the first time, we realized that our language lacks words to express this offense, the demolition of a man.

Human memory is a marvelous but fallacious instrument. This is a known truth: the memories that lie within us are not carved in stone; not only do they tend to fade over the years, but they often change, or even grow by incorporating foreign elements.

Chemistry is the art of separating, weighing, and distinguishing: these are three exercises useful also to one who undertakes to describe events or give body to their imagination.

I wrote this book to bear witness, not to complain. I believed that my particular way of telling, the restraint of the narrative, could itself constitute a form of denunciation.

Primo Levi's birthplace and the city where he spent his entire life, Turin is the heart of his world. It was here that he was born, studied chemistry, was arrested, returned after the war, and wrote most of his work in the family apartment on Corso Re Umberto.

A forced labor camp attached to Auschwitz where Primo Levi was deported from February 1944 to January 1945. This is the place that shaped the core of his work, where he survived thanks to his skills as a chemist in the Chemical Kommando at the Buna-Werke factory.

A Fascist transit camp near Modena where Primo Levi was held after his arrest before being deported to Auschwitz. He describes the agonizing wait before deportation in the opening pages of 'If This Is a Man'.

The mountainous region where Primo Levi joined a group of partisan resistance fighters in the autumn of 1943, following the Nazi occupation of northern Italy. It was in these mountains that he was arrested by the Fascist Militia in December 1943.

The institution where Primo Levi earned his chemistry degree in 1941, despite Fascist racial laws that forced him to list his 'Jewish race' on his diploma. This scientific training proved decisive for his survival at Auschwitz.