Luigi Silori

Luigi Silori was born in Rome in 1921, only son. His father, Fernando, was a landowner in Stifone, descendant of an old family of Narni. His mother, Antonietta Pacchelli, was a school teacher, who graduated in Rome in 1901, when such a thing still was for a woman very uncommon in Italy. She was also a piano teacher and writer.
He lived in an old house in Rome's middle-class Quartiere Trieste. After primary school, Silori attended a distinguished grammar school, the classical gymnasium Torquato Tasso, where he had brilliant classmates, like the actor Vittorio Gassman, that was his friend for decades, and the theater director Luigi Squarzina.

At the beginning of 1941, when he was still 19 ys. old, Silori was called to military service and ordered as a gunnery lieutenant of Italian Army to Greece with 33rd Mountain Infantry Division Acqui, that occupied the island of Cephalonia during the Greco-Italian War. Following the Italian surrender on 8 September 1943, thousands of soldiers from the division were murdered on the islands during Operation Achse, in what became known as the Cephallonia massacre, one of the largest prisoner of war massacres of the war and one of the largest-scale German atrocities to be committed by Wehrmacht troops. Silori was one of the few officers that, at the end, weren't gunned down by Wehrmacht and he was deported to Germany and sent to the concentration camp of Meppen - Fullen.

He died in Rome on 9 July 1983, aged 61. He left his wife Daisy, after 38 years of marriage and his only son Fernando, aged 27.