The talk will analyse some debates which took place in Italy in early 2013, after the publication of two books whose main focus is a 'dirty secret' of Levi's partisan unit: the trial and execution of two young members of the unit.

The discussion is mainly in the context of Primo Levi's work, but it also touches on other literary accounts of "partisan summary justice" and on what the British historian John Foot calls "Italy's divided memory", namely the tendency for conflicting narratives (personal, public, cultural) to emerge from crucial moments of Italian history.

Primo Levi

Mirna Cicioni was born in Rome and has taught Italian at La Trobe and Monash Universities. She has published widely on Primo Levi and other post WWII Italian Jewish writers. She is currently working as a freelance community interpreter and working on a monograph on autobiography and humor in the works of Levi, Ginzburg, Sereni and Zargani. With an English colleague she has recently co-translated Renzo Modiano's Of Jewish Race (Vagabond Press, 2013).