Mario Rigoni Stern was barely twenty-one and already a battle veteran at the time of the World War II disaster he describes in The Sergeant in the Snow. In July 1942 three divisions of Italian Alpini troops, specially trained for winter warfare, began retreating - entirely on foot, with no supplies, at temperatures of 30-40 degrees below zero. By the end of the march, 90,000 men were missing or dead and 45,000 frostbitten and wounded. This narrative, together with his novel The Story of Tonle and several other works, paints a broad fresco of Italy's history in this century, chronicling social and political change so radical and profound that it has touched even those in such secluded provincial communities as that which Rigoni Stern has so masterfully described.
Author
Mario Rigoni Stern was an Italian author and World War II veteran. 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 corp during the disastrous retreat from Russia in the World War II. It is his only work to be translated into English and Spanish. 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). He was awarded the Premio Campiello and the Premio Bagutta for Storia di Tönle, and the Italian PEN prize for Sentieri sotto la neve.
