Luigi Silori

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

Luigi Silori (1921 - 1983) was an Italian literary critic, a novelist, a playwright, a radio and a popular television personality in the fifties and sixties.
Descendent of an old family from Umbria, at the beginning of his university studies, he was called to arms and he spent four years in the Italian army during all the WWII. 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.
He died in Rome, at 61.

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 a piano teacher and a writer, too.
He lived in an old house, in the middle-class Quartiere Trieste, in Rome. 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 arms 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 by Wehrmacht and he was deported to Germany and pent in the concentration camp of Meppen - Fullen.

Last years and death

Luigi Silori died in Rome on 9 July 1983, at 61, leaving his wife Daisy, after 38 years spent together in the marriage, and an only son, Fernando, 27.

External links

• Luigi Silori at the Internet Movie Database