何塞·乔凡尼，Joseph Damiani, a.k.a José Giovanni, was born on June 22th, 1923, to a Corsican family. He did many little jobs when he was a teenager. Washing dishes in a train-restaurant, lumberjack, coal miner, waiter in a hotel restaurant of Chamonix. During WWII, from 1942 to 1944, he was a high mountain junior guide, and was in the resistance, too.