Luigi Einaudi. Diary of exile 1943-44
By Villi Hermann
(from the Locarno Film Festival 2000)

On the 8th of September 1943 Luigi Einaudi (1874-1961), future first president of the Italian Republic, abandoned Turin, which was occupied by the Wehrmacht, and went to Switzerland. It was "the flight of the people in the face of the barbarians", he wrote in his "Diary of Exile". Taking this as a starting point, the filmmaker Villi Hermann interviews those individuals still alive (Swiss and Italian, soldiers and partisans, Jews who were denied entry to Switzerland and survived the holocaust), who provide an account of this troubled period from an unusual perspective. Luigi Einaudi.

Synopsis and brief concept
During September 1943 the later Italian President Luigi Einaudi and his wife Ida fled from the nazi occupied city of Turin, Italy, across the region of Val d'Aosta in Northern Italy to Switzerland. Einaudi was 69 years old. He made out that this day was "the death of his fatherland". The Italian blackshirts fascists and the German nazi uniforms were near the University of Turin, of which he was the rector. They arrived at Martigny (Switzerland). They remained a short while in a quarantine period in Lausanne. Their son Giulio (the young dynamic Italian editor who was before imprisoned) left Italy, his country already under the fascist power, with his girl friend, his future wife, Renata Aldrovandi. The son Giulio remained in Lausanne, in Geneva and Luigi Einaudi went to Basel. There he got in contact with the university world and other Italian emigrants. He co-operated with different Swiss newspaper and taught economy to the Italians interned soldiers in the universities in Geneva and in Lausanne. Einaudi annotated in his diary the Swiss temporary stay "with a fertile modesty" till his return to Rome, arranged by the Allies during December 1944. In 1948 he will be elected first President of the Italian Democratic Republic after war. His diary is been published only after 55 years from the famous publishing house Giulio Einaudi of Turin. In my documentary I speak with persons who knew Luigi Einaudi as a lecturer, as an anti-fascist and as a refuge in Switzerland. It revisited the surroundings quoted by Einaudi and to found the places and the persons that knew him still alive, Swiss and Italians, militaries, Italian partisans and Jewish refuges who survived the Holocaust. All these testimonies give back part of the war atmosphere of the period in Switzerland and Northern Italy. I trace the outline of that historical period and of the surrounding by utilising, first of all, the text of the diary itself, using a narrator, the famous Italian actor of the Taviani brothers: Omero Antonutti.. Different archive footage give a further dimension to the text of the diary, written by the liberal-conservative, Luigi Einaudi. Einaudi had the opportunity to discover our war reality and the reality of many refugees, I should say from a "latin" perspective and from a privileged point of view: perspective rarely taken into consideration in documentaries and historical researches of this European period.

© Villi Hermann, Imagofilm Lugano 2000