Nuto Revelli

Benvenuto “Nuto” Revelli, was born in Cuneo, in 1919 and died in the same city, in 2004. His life was marked by war, first by participating in it, and later writing about it with unsurpassed honesty and directness. After going through Fascist Italy’s educational system, Revelli became an officer in the Italian army’s elite “Cunense” mountain division and was sent to the Eastern front to fight the Russians in July 1942. That winter, the Soviets encircled the entire Italian Army on the Don. Thousands of men fell in combat, thousands more were taken prisoners and a great many more succumbed to the cold, hunger and exhaustion.

For his role in the retreat from the Don he was awarded two silver medals for military valour and a promotion to lieutenant for war merit. On the day of the armistice, 8 September 1943, he was in Cuneo, recovering from wounds sustained on the Russian front. He was among the first organisers of the Resistance in the Cuneo area, where he commanded the 4th band, then the Giustizia e Libertà ‘Carlo Rosselli’ brigade in Italy and France.

In the post-war period, the need to bear witness to what he had experienced drove him to a task of narration and research that would over the years become a true monument to national memory and an example of civic commitment.

His experiences of the fascist war and the partisan struggle, and his interest in history seen ‘from below’ guided him in the collection of testimonies from the world of veterans and then from the Cuneo peasant world. During his long years of work, he flanked the writing of books with the activity of bearing witness in schools.

Twentieth century testimony writing owes much of its development to records of the Holocaust. On one particular occasion, Italy’s most renowned Holocaust survivor, Primo Levi, spoke of testimony writing as an ‘impegno del dopo’ (an obligation of afterwards). The fascinating aspect of this term is that he used it to unite his own work with that of two of his friends and contemporaries, Nuto Revelli and Mario Rigoni Stern, neither of whom were Jews or survivors of the Holocaust.

Revelli recalls: «We had a ‘common matrix’ Primo Levi, Mario Rigoni Stern, and I, so Primo always said, even though we had lived different experiences [...] The ‘common matrix’ that Primo was referring to? Our converging war experiences, but above all our commitment to the aftermath [sic], that not wanting to forget, that wanting to bear witness at all costs.»

His books, all published by Einaudi, include La guerra dei poveri (1962), La strada del davai (1966, 2010 and 2020), Mai tardi (1967, 2008 and 2020) , L'ultimo fronte (1971 and 2009) , Il mondo dei vinti (1977 and 2016), L'anello forte (1985) Il disperso di Marburg (1994 and 2008), Il prete giusto (1998, 2008 and 2021), Le due guerre (2003 e 2005), Il popolo che manca (2013), Il testimone. Conversazioni e interviste. 1966-2003 (ed. by Mario Cordero).