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 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.

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.

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 during the Greco-Italian War.

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.