Levi was born in Turin, lived there almost all his life, and wrote most of his work in an apartment off Corso Re Umberto — the building he was deported from in 1943 and returned to in 1945 after Auschwitz.
The Periodic Table is a memoir in twenty-one chapters, each named for an element, that loops through his life as a chemist and survivor. It is the best single book about Turin: the city's working bourgeoisie, the Piedmontese countryside, the laboratories and factories, and the long shadow of the war.