Loriano Macchiavelli

Sarti Antonio, a cop as honest as he is tenacious, is an anti-hero blessed with an extraordinary memory, addicted to coffee, and subject to colitis. He lives in Bologna, where most of the investigations that fall to him take place. In these stories, snatches of the sergeant’s past not only come to light; they illuminate our own present-day reality, which would appear to prove that the protagonist’s world is a faithful copy of the one inhabited by every one of us.

Loriano Macchiavelli (Vergato, Bologna, 1934) has written numerous plays for the Italian stage. Since 1974, he has focused his efforts on the crime novel and has published several of them, his best-known character being the police sergeant Sarti Antonio. Moreover, under the pen name Jules Quicher, he wrote Funerale dopo Ustica (1989) and Strage (1990), the latter creating a host of legal problems for the author. His novel Macaronì (1997) marks the start of a ongoing literary collaboration with Francesco Guccini, with whom he has written all the novels featuring the characters Benedetto Santovito (the Marshall) and Marco Gherardini, aka Poiana. And thanks to the novel Tango e gli altri. Romanzo di una raffica, anzi tre, co-written with the singer-songwriter from Emilia, the author duo won the Scerbanenco Award in 2007. Macchiavelli teamed up with Marcello Fois and Carlo Lucarelli to found Gruppo 13, while he joined forces with Renzo Cremante to found and direct Delitti di Carta, a magazine devoted solely to the Italian crime genre. His novels have inspired films, TV movies and series, radio dramas and audiobooks. There is no doubt that Macchiavelli is one of the authors, or even the sole author, to have contributed the most to the rebirth of the Italian noir novel.