The Periodic Table (Italian: Il sistema periodico) is a 1975 short story collection by Primo Levi, named after the periodic table in chemistry. In 2006, the Royal Institution of Great Britain named it the best science book ever.^[1]

The stories are autobiographical episodes based on the author's experiences as a Jewish-Italian doctoral-level chemist under the Fascist regime in Italy and afterwards. They include various themes that follow a chronological sequence: his ancestry; his study of chemistry and practising the profession in wartime Italy; a pair of imaginative tales he wrote at that time,^[2] and his subsequent experiences as an anti-Fascist partisan; his arrest and imprisonment, interrogation, and internment in the Fossoli di Carpi and Auschwitz camps; and postwar life as an industrial chemist.

Each of the twenty-one stories in the book bears the name of a chemical element as its title and has a connection to the element in some way.

1. "Argon" – The author's childhood, the community of Piedmontese Jews and their language
2. "Hydrogen" – Two children experiment with electrolysis
3. "Zinc" – Laboratory experiments in a university
4. "Iron" – The author's adolescence, between the racial laws and the Alps
5. "Potassium" – An experience in the laboratory with unexpected results
6. "Nickel" – Inside the chemical laboratories of a mine
7. "Lead" – The narrative of a primitive metallurgist (fiction)^[3]
8. "Mercury" – A tale of populating a remote and desolate island (fiction)^[4]
9. "Phosphorus" – An experience on a job in the chemical industry
10. "Gold" – A story of imprisonment
11. "Cerium" – Survival in the Lager
12. "Chromium" – The recovery of livered varnishes
13. "Sulfur" – An experience on a job in the chemical industry (apparently fiction)
14. "Titanium" – A scene of daily life (apparently fiction)
15. "Arsenic" – Consultation about a sugar sample
16. "Nitrogen" – Trying to manufacture cosmetics by scratching the floor of a hen-house
17. "Tin" – A domestic chemical laboratory
18. "Uranium" – Analyzing a piece of metal
19. "Silver" – The story of some unsuitable photographic plates
20. "Vanadium" – Finding a German chemist after the war
21. "Carbon" – The history of a carbon atom

• First American edition, New York, Schocken Books, 1984
  • ISBN 0-8052-3929-4 (hardcover)
  • ISBN 0-8052-0811-9 (trade paperback)
• Reissues
  • Random House hardcover edition, September 1996 ISBN 0-679-44722-9 (ISBN 978-0-679-44722-1)
  • Knopf Publishing Group paperback edition, April 1995 ISBN 0-8052-1041-5 (ISBN 9780805210415)

The book was dramatised for radio by BBC Radio 4 in 2016.^[5] The dramatisation was broadcast in 12 episodes, with Henry Goodman and Akbar Kurtha as Primo Levi.