The Places of Primo Levi in Avigliana

But I had been back from prison for three months, and I found life hard…. I looked anxiously for work, and found it in the big lakeshore factory, still damaged by the war, and besieged in those months by mud and ice. No one paid much attention to me: colleagues, director, and laborers had other things to think about, the son who hadn’t returned from Russia, the stove without wood, the shoes without soles, the warehouses without supplies, the windows without glass, the cold that burst the pipes, inflation, want, and virulent local feuds. I had kindly been granted a rickety desk in the laboratory, a noisy, drafty workplace full of people coming and going with rags and cans, and had been assigned no definite task; unoccupied as a chemist and in a state of complete alienation (though it was not called that at the time), I wrote, in no order, page after page of the memories that were poisoning me, and my colleagues looked at me stealthily, as if I were a harmless lunatic.

My future wife lived in Turin and I lived in Avigliana and worked in Avigliana in a semi-destroyed factory run by  Montecatini, where I learned how to make paints….  They assigned me to technical problems. I solved them as well as I could and sometimes I did not solve them, I did not manage to solve them but anyway I felt committed body and soul to this work and, along with this, to another piece of work because simultaneously – and I am astonished today when I recall it – how I could do three things – each of them different – simultaneously: to be a fiancé, to work as a chemist, and to write a book.