Pennacini Archives

Marco Pennacini Archives (1973; 2011)

Marco Pennacini interviewed Primo Levi at the end of summer 1973, in his house of Corso Re Umberto, in Turin. Marco at that time was fifteen and attended the second year of Liceo Gobetti. After reading Se questo è un uomo and La tregua the young boy showed interest in Nazi concentration camps and asked to talk with the family friend Primo Levi.
Marco went to the date with a radio cassette player, to record the whole talk, in order to write eventually a report to present at school.
After Marco’s death, the family lost track of the tapes used to record the interview. The cassettes (probably two) were forgotten in the office of Marco’s mother, Liliana Treves, until they moved to another location, after more than thirty years, when one cassette was found by chance in a box by the then-secretary of Liliana Treves, who sent the cassette to family Pennacini.
The documents of the Archives were donated by Adriano Pennacini and Liliana Treves to the International Primo Levi Studies Center with two transfers. First, in February 2011, the digital reproduction on CD-ROM, the transcript of the interview and two articles by Tonino Cassarà (January 2011) about the interview; in November 2011, after a cleaning-up of the audio files, the Center edited a new transcript, by Daniela Muraca.
In October 2012 the Pennacinis – after finding the report (a typescript) presented at school by Marco with a classmate after the interview to Primo Levi – donated the document to the Center, to complete the collection already transferred.

Tonino Cassarà, "Primo Levi. Dal fascismo ad Auschwitz c'è una linea diretta", l'Unità, January 26, 2011.