Mario Rigoni Stern

Marco Paolini interviews Mario Rigoni Stern about—among other things—his well-known experience as a soldier on the Eastern front during WWII, culminating in the infamous retreat of the Italian troops, the difficult reintegration into civilian life after the war, his relationship with his literary work and with his ancestral land, the Asiago Plateau.

In February, 1945, Primo Levi (1919-1987) and other Auschwitz survivors set off for home. The journey took more then eight months. Sixty years later, a film crew retraces Levi's steps. Levi's words, mainly from "The Truce" (1963), tell us what he experienced. In turn, we see Poland's hollow post-war factories, nationalism in the Ukraine, Soviet-style Communism in Belarus, the abandoned town of Prypiat (Chernobyl), poverty and emigration from Moldavia, Italian factories in Romania, and on across Hungary and Slovakia to Munich where Levi's rage found no listeners. Then home to Turin. An aged Mario Rigoni Stern remembers his friend. What has changed? Some issues of the war remain unsettled.

A 1983 six-episodes series, made by Massimo Sani, which recounts the WW2 battles involving Italy between 1940 and 1942: from the attacks to France and Greece to the clashes in Africa and the disastrous expedition to Russia.