“At Auschwitz I was no longer Rubino Romeo Salmoni, but Jew number A15810, to be exterminated,” he later wrote in his memoir In the End, I Beat Hitler. The book was freely adapted into the screenplay co-written by Roberto Benigni, who directed the film and also won a Best Actor Oscar for it, as a character named Guido Orefice. Rubino Romeo Salmoni, the real-life inspiration for the Oscar-winning 1997 Life Is Beautiful, about an Italian imprisoned in a German concentration camp during World War
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Rubino Romeo Salmoni dead at 91
