At the height of Mussolini’s Italy, in the midst of war, few if any locals took notice of a diminutive woman cycling around the Italian countryside looking for eggs. After all, in the midst of international turmoil, a mother searching for rations for her children seemed the epitome of “normal.”

Her native town of Turin, in northern Italy near the borders of France and Germany, was the object of bombing campaigns first by the British, then after 1941 by the Americans, and finally by the Germans. In 1942 Rita Levi-Montalcini and her family fled to the countryside for protection.