[1] Born in Milan, Risi graduated in medicine, as did his brother Dino, then with the outbreak of the Second World War he fought on the Russian front and was interned in Switzerland.

[2] With the end of the war he moved to Paris where he joined a group of filmmakers, led by the Americans Richard Leacock and John Ferno, engaged in documenting the disaster of the war in Europe through a series of human-geography documentary films.

[3] During this time Risi also published his second collection of poems (L'esperienza, 1948) and worked as a translator of poetry works by Pierre Jean Jouve, Constantine P. Cavafy, Sophocles, Jules Laforgue and others.

[2] Back in Italy in 1954, he directed a dozen documentary films on popular figures and moments in the history of the twentieth century.

[6] His poetry style is referred as "poetics of the usual" (poetica dell'usuale), in reference of the attempt of grasping the contradictions and the mystifications of everyday life through a basic, simple language, close to a diaristic style.