Remembrance Day, Cultural Institute events in the world

Primo Levi, the Italian writer who bore witness to the Holocaust to a greater extent than anyone else, has been taking centre stage in a packed programme of events organised by Italian Embassies and Cultural Institutes throughout the world to commemorate Remembrance Day in 2019.  The centenary of Levi’s birth has provided the opportunity to dedicate exhibitions, debates, conferences and films to honour his life and works. Three meetings devoted to Levi’s works have been planned by the Italian Cultural Institute in Amsterdam. The writer will be remembered in Athens with a screening of the films ‘La Tregua’ (“The Truce”) by Francesco Rosi, based on a book by the same name by Levi, and ‘Il Giardino dei Finzi Contini’ (“The Garden of the Finzi Continis”), Vittorio De Sica’s masterpiece. The Berlin Italian Cultural Institute organised a reading of the book ‘The Truce’ by Udo Samel, with musical accompaniment by Susanne Paul on cello.  Levi’s texts were also read in both Italian and English at an event organised by the Chicago Cultural Institute. A conference on Primo Levi was held in Copenhagen, while the Cultural Institute in Haifa analysed one of Levi’s other important books, ‘The Periodic Table’. Actor Riccardo Bocci gave a theatrical reading of ‘The Truce’ in Los Angeles, while the Melbourne Italian Cultural Institute presented a screening of ‘Gli sci di Primo Levi’ (“Primo Levi’s skis”) by Paola Toscano. Events commemorating Remembrance Day in Pretoria, Caracas and Rabat were also dedicated to Primo Levi, with a guide to the reading of ‘If this is a man’ and ‘The Wrench’.  The Paris Italian Cultural Institute commemorated the Shoah with a performance of the story of Irene Nemirovsky, the Jewish writer who died in Auschwitz in 1942. Remembrance Day in Brussels was dedicated to Andra and Tati Bucci, two sisters who survived Birkenau concentration camp and continue to accompany students visiting the camp to ensure the memory is kept alive. The first cartoon on the Shoah ‘La stella di Andra e Tati’ produced by the Italian broadcasting company RAI was based on their story and will be shown at the Cultural Institute with the two survivors in attendance. Finally, many other Italian diplomatic offices throughout the world have chosen to honour the memory of the victims of Nazism by showing the documentary ‘Eravamo italiani’ (“We Were Italians”) by Ruggero Gabbai. It is a film that gathered witness accounts from Italian survivors who began to recount their stories after the death of Primo Levi.