Roberto Perrone's Books

Biography

Roberto Perrone was born in Rapallo on the Italian Riviera in 1957. He landed his first job as a journalist in Genoa and then moved to Milan to work for Il Giornale and Il Corriere della Sera. The latter (The Evening Courier) is the largest paper in Italy. For the next thirty years, he built himself a career as a sports journalist, covering the Olympics, the major tennis championships and the World Cup.

Sports Journalist

He has a passion for football at all levels. In 2003 he published his first novel, Zamora, named after a famous Spanish goalkeeper. It tells the comic tragedy of an accountant forced to play amateur football by his boss. At the other end of the scale, in 2010, he published Numero 1, a biography of the Juventus goalkeeper and Italian national team Captain, Gigi Buffon.

Food Critic

Not satisfied with his career as a sports journalist, Perrone went on to become a food critic. His column – Scorribande – won the Premiolino award for food culture.

Novelist

Roberto Perrone’s books are many and varied. He has penned a fistful of romantic comedies. They are, unsurprisingly, centred around the worlds of food and football. He was the first Italian novelist to reach the shortlist in two different categories of the Bancarella Prize. First, in the sports category, with Averti Trovato Ora (Now I’ve Found You), in which a 20-something footballer meets a 40-something art historian. Then, in the cooking category, for La Cucina Degli Amori Impossibili (The Kitchen of Impossible Love). The book is a Romeo and Juliettesque tale of love between two rival dynasties of restauranteurs.

Crime Writer

In 2017 Perrone changed genre and published The Second Life of Inspector Canessa. It is the first three stories about a long-retired Carabinieri Inspector who fought the Red Brigade in the 1970s and 80s.

Perrone is a more than capable writer, with many awards to his name. However, his pedigree doesn’t inspire confidence that he is a serious crime writer.

It transpires that Inspector Canessa was Perrone’s first creation.

“The truth is that Canessa was my first novel. I am an omnivorous reader, but I love crime. I started writing about Annibale Canessa in 2000 though curiously, I called him Sebastiano. At the same time, I wrote a tale about football, “Zamora”. A good friend was a talent scout for Garzanti, an Italian publishing house. He asked me if I had written anything, and I sent him Zamora, which became my first published book. So I took another route in my career as an author… In 2015 I decided to finish the Canessa novel, though I had used the name Sebastiano as the hero in another story, so I created Annibale. I think it was a good choice.”

Skin in the Game

Perrone can also add first-hand experience to his novels:

“I studied Italian literature in Genoa during the Years of Lead. My university was close to Via Fracchia when the carabinieri killed four Red Brigade terrorists. Via Fracchia became Canessa’s Via Gaeta. My reconstruction is fiction, but the facts are true. Genoa was one of the most blood-stained cities in Italy in the Years of Lead. It was in Genoa that terrorists staged their first kidnapping and where the first of many magistrates was killed.”

If that isn’t enough to assure you of Roberto Perrone’s passion for crime writing, you should look at his picture. His “Writer” jumper is a tribute to the “Writer” bulletproof vest worn by Rick Castle in the ABC crime series Castle. Unfortunately, unlike Castle’s original, the jumper isn’t stab-proof. That might be useful should a disgruntled Lazio fan take exception to one of his matchday commentaries.