Giacomo Debenedetti was born in a Jewish family in Biella

Biella

Biella is a town and comune in the northern Italian region of Piemonte, the capital of the province of the same name, with some 45,800 inhabitants as of 2009. It is located about 80 km northeast of Turin and about 80 km west-northwest of Milan.It lies in the foothills of the Alps,...

 region of Piemonte Italy. He became an Italian

Italy

Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...

 journalist, literary critic and author of the short books October 16, 1943-- an account of the deportation of Roman Jews shortly after the occupation of Rome by the Nazi army—and Eight Jews, a critique of Raffale Alianello's defense of fascist Questore (Police Commissioner) Pietro Caruso

Pietro Caruso

Pietro Caruso was an Italian Fascist and head of the Italian police during the final part of World War II....

 at his trial for war crimes, on the basis that he had crossed eight Jewish names off of a list of Roman citizens slated for execution in the Ardeatine Caves Massacre

Ardeatine massacre

The Fosse Ardeatine massacre was a mass execution carried out in Rome on 24 March 1944 by German occupation troops during the Second World War as a reprisal for a partisan attack conducted on the previous day in central Rome....

.