Luigi Silori
Luigi Silori 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. Silori served in the ill-fated Acqui Division, and was a survivor of the Cephalonia Massacre. After 1945, he graduated in Literature and started to write novels and theatrical texts. In 1954 he began appearing on both television and radio, and became very popular in Italy as "the man who introduced the books on TV".
Biography
Early life and education
Luigi Silori was born in Rome in 1921, an only son. His father, Fernando, was a landowner in Stifone, and a descendant of an old family from Narni. 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. She was also a piano teacher and writer.Silori lived in an old house in Rome's middle-class Quartiere Trieste. After primary school, he attended a distinguished grammar school, the classical gymnasium Torquato Tasso, where he had brilliant classmates, like the actor Vittorio Gassman and the theater director Luigi Squarzina.