Six Italian partisans from the Second World War read extracts from Isaac Asimov’s “Foundation Series” of science fiction books. Italian translations of Isaac Asimov’s science fiction trilogy “Foundation Series” came out in 1963 and 1964. In the same years, Italian literature entered an important phase for the Resistance Novel, a genre whose narrative takes place in the partisan groups during Second World War’s Italian Resistance – for example, Beppe Fenoglio’s Una questione privata, defined by Italo Calvino as “the novel of Italian Resistance”. Una questione privata was published in 1963, exactly the same year when Italian translations of Asimov’s Foundation Series started to come out. In each of the external locations portrayed in the film, an episode connected with Resistance in central Italy took place. The soundtrack of the film comprises extracts from 1966 film Fantastic Voyage, of which Isaac Asimov was subsequently asked to write a literary version.
