Beware of the wire!

An illustrated book by Alessandro Berretti, an author who worked as a graphic designer for the Pirelli advertising campaigns in the late 1930s and early 1940s, before being interned in the Sandbostel concentration camp until the end of the Second World War. In the volume, preserved in the Pirelli Foundation Library, Berretti recounts his dramatic experience with more than 115 illustrated plates about his imprisonment: from the black and white with which, in the first section of the book entitled 'Way of the Cross', he depicts the places and faces of the people he met, to the colour of the ironic cartoons, in which he shows moments of everyday life, dreams and hopes, in the second part entitled 'Imprisonment in good humour', and then again to the black and white of the portraits of the prisoners in the concluding part, 'Snapshots in the Concentration Camps'. The illustrations are accompanied by texts in Italian, English and French by L. Pession and a preface by Giovannino Guareschi, a fellow prisoner in Sandbostel. The first edition of 1946 opens with a dedication: 'To my fellow prisoners made by misfortune more worthy of freedom', which continues in the 1974 Sansoni edition with: "30 years later, to the children of my comrades, so that they remember what freedom is worth".  

Attenti al filo! (Beware of the wire!)
Alessandro Berretti
Sansoni, 1974