Luigi Silori

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 of an old family from Umbria, at the beginning of his university studies, he was called to military service and he 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. After 1945, he graduated in Literature and started to write novels and theatrical texts. In 1954 he started to collaborate with Italian Radio Television and he became very popular in Italy as the man that introduced the books on TV.

Luigi Silori
Luigi Silori with Italian actress Elsa De Giorgi
Born	Luigi Silori (1921-11-19)19 November 1921 Rome, Italy
Died	9 July 1983(1983-07-09) (aged 61) Rome, Italy
Occupation	short story writer, literary critic, television personality, playwright
Nationality	Italian

Biography

Early life and education

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

World War II

At the beginning of 1941, when he was still 19 ys. old, Silori was called to military service and ordered as a gunnery lieutenant of Italian Army to Greece with 33rd Mountain Infantry Division Acqui, that occupied the island of Cephalonia 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 Cephallonia massacre, one of the largest prisoner of war massacres of the war and one of the largest-scale German atrocities to be committed by Wehrmacht troops. Silori was one of the few officers that, at the end, weren't gunned down by Wehrmacht and he was deported to Germany and sent to the concentration camp of Meppen - Fullen.

Post-World War II Era

Years of Television

Last years and death

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

Bibliography

Literary prizes

External links

• Luigi Silori on IMDb