Approaching the end of an intense and successful career, Arrigo Levi has attempted to write an account of "how I became a newspaper reporter". But, of course, memory tends to have a mind of its own, and that is how this calm remembrance of the past came into being. Levi's account features reflections and reminiscences that evoke the happy world of his childhood, spent in a well-to-do Jewish family from Modena, and his family's plight after the advent of Fascism and the introduction of discriminatory "race laws", including emigration to Argentina, the trip back home, his participation as a soldier in the birth of Israel, a decade spent in Churchill's and George VI's England, and his definitive commitment to the profession of journalism. In narrating his travels and travails Levi also reflects on faith, totalitarianism, and the Shoah, thus offering the reader a pointed yet cheerful lesson on the history of the 20th century.

Arrigo Levi is an essayist, a journalist and a councillor to Presidents of the Italian Republic Carlo Azeglio Ciampi and Giorgio Napolitano.