Alfieri High School remembers Sandro Delmastro, “Iron”

On Friday, January 23, 2026, at 3:30 pm, at the Vittorio Alfieri State Classical High School, Corso Dante 80, Turin, there will be a presentation and analysis of Roberta Mori’s book, Svegliarsi adulti, Vita di Sandro Delmastro, capo partigiano e amico di Primo Levi, Einaudi, Torino 2025.

The author, Roberta Mori (International Center for Primo Levi Studies in Turin), will discuss the subject with historian Aldo Salassa (Novecento.org, Istoreto).
There will be readings and audio-video recordings by students from class 5 MI., with the support of students from the Alfieri High School involved in the School-Work Training program (“Library 2.0” and “Tales of a Modern Past”).
The meeting, aimed at students and teachers from the high school and all interested parties, will offer a historical and biographical investigation into the life of Delmastro (Turin, September 7, 1917 – Cuneo, April 3, 1944), shedding light on the man beyond the literary myth.
Delmastro was a student at the Royal High School “Vittorio Alfieri”, a mountaineer and then a partisan leader, killed by the fascists, but he remained imprinted in the minds of readers also and above all as the unforgettable protagonist of the story Iron from Levi’s Periodic Table, who remembers him thus:
Seeing Sandro in the mountains reconciled me with the world, and made me forget the nightmare that weighed on Europe. It was his place, what he was made for, like the marmots whose whistle and snout he imitated: in the mountains he became happy, with a silent and contagious happiness, like a light turned on. It aroused in me a new communion with the earth and the sky, where my need for freedom, the fullness of my strength, and the hunger to understand the things that had driven me to chemistry converged.