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| 15/07/2015
Historical Fiction by Panto'

Historical Fiction by Panto'

THE MANAGER AT THE UNIVERSITY HAS WON A LITERARY COMPETITION PROMOTED BY IL RESTO DEL CARLINO. THE WINNING PIECE TELLS THE STORY OF EMIGRATION IN THE LATE 1800S, WHILE FOCUSING ON THE DRAMATIC EVENTS OF THE TIME

Giuseppe Pantò, Head of Corporate Image, Publications and Web at Bocconi, is one of the winners of the “130 lines, one year, one history” Literary Prize, awarded by Il Resto del Carlino to celebrate its 130th anniversary. Short stories with a maximum length of 130 lines and set in the years between 1885 and 2015 (the organizers assigned a year to each author) were eligible. Chaired by Valerio Massimo Manfredi, the panel then chose the top ten short stories out of the 500 received. The winning stories will be published in a volume available with the newspaper. “It’s very rewarding, especially for authors like myself who have always been passionate about history and the literary genre of historical fiction, which unfortunately is not very pervasive in Italy,” says Pantò. His winning story, “Noi che eravamo gli altri,” is set in 1891 and tells the story of an Italian family emigrating South America to seek their fortune. Giuseppe is not a novice: two of his novels, Chaturanga and Il Cerchio del Diavolo, have already been published, but he was particularly excited about this award because he received it from one of the genre’s best authors, Manfredi. “Historical fiction is a difficult genre because the fictional part must be inserted into a real historical context. It has to be credible from the point of view of the setting, the way the characters speak and many other details. Before writing, you need to do a lot of research.” This is the reason Giuseppe waited a long time before writing “for real,” now that family commitments – “my daughters are getting older,” he says – have given him more time. “I started working on Chaturanga in 2009, when the research stage began. I retraced the history of chess from the 6th century, in India, until 1714 in Palermo, when the House of Savoy succeeded the Spanish. Years of splendor were replaced by a more moderate period. The fictional events of the story are inserted onto this historical foundation.” Before its genesis, Chaturanga, published by Historica in 2015, was not the first novel that Giuseppe Pantò published. With Il Cerchio del Diavolo, self-published on Amazon in 2013, Giuseppe decided to participate in the Big Jump competition. The competition, held by Amazon and Rizzoli, awarded his novel the top spot in the historical fiction category. “And in 2014 it was published by Rizzoli. It’s a story set in Milan in the late 1700s, a city about to go through the Napoleon era, a time of great transformation.” Giuseppe has also finished a noir and a thriller, but hasn’t decided what to do with them yet. But it’s clear that his heart has always led him to his favorite genre, historical fiction. “It’s a kind of time travel, and I don’t have the same passion for the time I’ve experienced first-hand.” He has lots of dreams and lots of ideas. One is more tangible than the others: “I’m writing a book on colonial Italy, between the late 1800s and the early 1900s. With two wars just around the corner, it’s a period with significant changes and contrasts, which is what I like to write about.”
 
Davide Ripamonti
Press Room
Universita' Bocconi
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E-mail davide.ripamonti@unibocconi.it
https://www.press.unibocconi.eu
Barbara Orlando
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E-mail barbara.orlando@unibocconi.it
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