Writing
Elba island, 1814. Martino is a young teacher, idealist and strongly anti Napoleon, in love with the beautiful and noble Baroness Emily. The young man finds himself serving as librarian to the Great Emperor in exile, whom he deeply hates, yet soon begins recording Napoleon's memoirs, getting to know and learning to value the man behind the myth. Among seductions and affairs, expectations and fears, he will craft a precise portrait that nevertheless will not manage to hide a final, inevitable, disappointment.
Thirty years after Primo Levi's death, Rai Cultura assembles a portrait that refuses to reduce him to the single label of Holocaust witness. Ten scholars, journalists and friends - among them the historian Carlo Ginzburg, the survivor and senator Liliana Segre, and his editor Ernesto Ferrero - each take up a different facet of a man who was novelist, poet, essayist, industrial chemist, amateur astronomer and mountaineer. Running through the film is the testimony of Ives Francisco, the young partisan arrested alongside Levi in the Aosta Valley in December 1943; the skis Levi left behind later carried Francisco into Switzerland and back again after the war, and give the film its title. Archive interviews return Levi's own voice on memory, work, writing and his Jewish roots.
