Mario Rigoni Stern
L'Ultima Partita A Carte

It is a sensation of emptiness, internal or external, that I feel when I think of the figure of a young Mario Rigoni Stern in front of the Lingotto, waiting for his uncle to come out.
It was 1942, and during his leave, in the evening, Rigoni Stern would go to wait for his uncle's exit, who was a security guard at the Lingotto.
I was at the Lingotto yesterday, and I see myself, half dazed after the bookish full immersion (but I admit it takes little to stun me), with an accelerated pace along the endless perimeter of the plant to reach the shuttle.
What I feel is a sensation of emptiness, which recalls random encounters, and seems like an oxygen bubble rising from the deep sea and exploding once on the surface: without sound or anything, as if it never existed.

Mario Rigoni Stern must have felt it too, after his war and human experience, after walking back from Russia, after the war and the camp.
The feeling of something that should have been obvious but wasn’t: attracting people's attention and denouncing all its unwarranted violence.
Perhaps he must have asked himself: why me and not someone else? What sense does it make that something so tragic happened to me, my peers, people with my same hopes and anxieties?
Why did all this happen without leaving a sound, as if it was customary?
Above all, why was I not given the right to a common existence, vaguely superficial, where my whole body is tense with the sole purpose of catching a shuttle after a day wandering around?
And not instead having to realize that the war you are about to go to will not be "nothing": not an "experience" or an adventure and all your uncle can wish you is to Return.

Luckily for me and for those who will read "L'Ultima Partita A Carte", the narrator Mario Rigoni Stern is not as rhetorical as I am.
He manages to tell his story, starting from his childhood in the mountains to the crucial junctures of his life that coincided with those of the second world war, without ever falling into rhetoric or, worse, cold political ideologies.
With an intense voice full of compassion, he recounts episodes of his life interspersed with brief paragraphs that provide historical data. There's the Monte Cervino ski battalion, the Albanian war, the Don, the pocket.
And the horrors of war emerge like the naked and dead bodies during the thaw in the Russian countryside, of which Rigoni was an incredulous witness.

The book, published by Einaudi in 2003, five years before Rigoni Stern's death, manages to be comprehensive despite its brevity.
It expands and adds reflections to what was already recounted in the more famous "Il Sergente Nella Neve" or "Quota Albania".
A book narrated with simplicity, but not superficially, illuminated by Mario Rigoni Stern's integral humanity.

If "Il Sergente Nella Neve" is the painting, then "L'Ultima Partita A Carte" is the frame.

"Why did I do it? Certainly not with the presumption that my writing would be printed and read. It seemed necessary to me, then, and urgent, to free myself from something I had inside, and to accomplish everything in words with vowels and consonants".
-From the introduction of the first edition of "Il Sergente Nella Neve"