Luigi Silori (19 November 1921 – 9 July 1983) was an Italian literary critic, novelist, playwright, and a popular radio and television personality in the 1950s and 1960s. Descended from an old Umbrian family, at the beginning of his university studies Silori was called to military service and spent four years in the Italian army during World War II. Silori served in the ill-fated Acqui Division, and was a survivor of the

Cephalonia Massacre The massacre of the Acqui Division, also known as the Cephalonia massacre, was the mass execution of the soldiers of the Italian 33rd Infantry Division "Acqui" by German soldiers on the island of Cephalonia, Greece, in September 1943, following t ...

. After 1945, he graduated in Literature and started to write novels and theatrical texts. In 1954 he began appearing on both television and radio, and became very popular in Italy as "the man who introduced the books on TV".

Biography

Early life and education

Luigi Silori was born in Rome in 1921, an only son. His father, Fernando, was a landowner in Stifone, and a descendant of an old family from Narni. His mother, Antonietta Pacchelli, was a school teacher, who graduated in Rome in 1901, when such a thing was very uncommon for a woman in Italy. She was also a piano teacher and writer. Silori lived in an old house in Rome's middle-class Quartiere Trieste. After primary school, he attended a distinguished grammar school, the classical gymnasium Torquato Tasso, where he had brilliant classmates, like the actor Vittorio Gassman (who was his friend for decades) and the theater director

Luigi Squarzina Luigi Squarzina (18 February 1922 – 8 October 2010) was an Italian theatre dramatist and director. Born in Livorno, Squarzina studied in Rome, at the Liceo Classico Tasso, where he had Vittorio Gassman as classmate. He got a degree cum laude i ...

World War II

At the beginning of 1941, when he was still 19 years old, Silori was called up to serve as a gunnery lieutenant of the Italian Army in Greece with the 33rd Mountain Infantry Division "Acqui", which occupied the island of

Cephalonia Kefalonia or Cephalonia ( el, Κεφαλονιά), formerly also known as Kefallinia or Kephallenia (), is the largest of the Ionian Islands in western Greece and the 6th largest island in Greece after Crete, Euboea, Lesbos, Rhodes and Chios. It i ...

during the Greco-Italian War. Following the Italian surrender on 8 September 1943, thousands of soldiers from the division were murdered on the islands during Operation Achse, in what became known as the

, one of the largest prisoner of war massacres during the war and one of the largest-scale

German atrocities The governments of the German Empire and Nazi Germany (under Adolf Hitler) ordered, organized and condoned a substantial number of war crimes, first in the Herero and Namaqua genocide and then in the First and Second World Wars. The most notable ...

to be committed by Wehrmacht troops. Silori was one of the few officers who, by the end, had not been gunned down by the Wehrmacht, and he was subsequently deported to Germany and sent to the concentration camp at Meppen-Fullen.

Post-World War II Era

Years of Television

Last years and death

Silori died in Rome on 9 July 1983, aged 61. He left behind his wife Daisy, after 38 years of marriage, and his only son Fernando, aged 27.

Literary prizes

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Silori, Luigi 1921 births 1983 deaths Italian literary critics Italian television personalities Italian dramatists and playwrights Italian male short story writers Italian male novelists Italian male dramatists and playwrights Writers from Rome 20th-century Italian male writers 20th-century Italian novelists 20th-century Italian short story writers Italian male non-fiction writers