Biography

Mario Rigoni Stern (1 November 1921 – 16 June 2008) was an Italian author and World War II veteran. He was born and grew up on the Asiago plateau in North East Italy. In 1938, after being rejected for service in the Navy, he enrolled in the tough Alpini advanced climbing/alpinism course in the Aosta Valley where Renato Chabod was among his teachers. Only four students graduated in that year. When German troops marched on Paris, his Alpini regiment was ordered to invade France from the Aosta Valley over the Little Saint Bernard Pass, a foray which he later described in the first part of his novel Quota Albania. He would then partake in the invasion of Albania and Greece, events which are detailed later in the book. His first novel Il sergente nella neve, published in 1953 (and the following year in English as The Sergeant in the Snow), draws on his own experience as a sergeant major in the Alpini corps during the disastrous retreat from Russia in World War II. It is his only work to be translated into English and Spanish. He would later say that having managed to make it back to Italy with all 70 of the men under his command was his finest achievement.

Other well-known works also include Le stagioni di Giacomo (Giacomo's Seasons), Storia di Tönle (The Story of Tönle), and the collection of short stories Sentieri sotto la neve (Paths Beneath the Snow).

His novels which are strongly autobiographical are strongly rooted the natural world with acute observations about life and wildlife in the mountains. Rigoni Stern was an enthusiastic mountaineer and hunter with an acute sense of the wonder of the natural world, an aspect best exemplified by his novel Il bosco degli urogalli (The Wood of the Black Grouse).