Mario Rigoni Stern (1 November 1921 – 16 June 2008) was an Italian author and World War II veteran.

In 1938, after being rejected for service in the Navy, he enrolled in the tough Alpini advanced climbing/alpinism course in the Aosta Valley where Renato Chabod was among his teachers.

When German troops marched on Paris, his Alpini regiment was ordered to invade France from the Aosta Valley over the Little Saint Bernard Pass, a foray which he later described in the first part of his novel Quota Albania.

His Sergeant in the Snow was later packaged by the Alfred A. Knopf publishing house into a collection of Italian war novels, along with entries by Renzo Biaison (The Army of Love) and Mario Tobino (The Deserts of Libya).

Rigoni Stern was an enthusiastic mountaineer and hunter with an acute sense of the wonder of the natural world, an aspect best exemplified by his novel Il bosco degli urogalli (The Wood of the Black Grouse).