Franco Ciampitti was a journalist and writer. He graduated in law from the University of Naples. He started to work as a journalist and reported for the radio from various European countries. In 1926, he joined Mussolini’s Fascist party and seemed to have been profiting from his closeness to the Fascist movement. In his youth, he was a versatile and avid sportsman, and wrote several sports novels. His most famous work was a football novel from the 1930s, The 90th Minute, for which he won the Italian Football Federation Award in 1932. He was a careful chronicler of the 1934 World Cup, and participated, always as a special envoy for the “Morning,” at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, where his novel Cerchi (Rings) was chosen to represent Italian sports fiction. This novel, in particular, is regarded as serving as a tool for the Fascist propaganda: Bruno and Marino, a javelin thrower and a skier, triumph in their respective disciplines at the Olympics, beating their opponents of other races. The book was first published in Italian in 1934, and a translation into German was published in 1936 under the title Die fünf Ringe (The five rings). After World War II, Ciampitti continued to work for newspapers and magazines, but was cold-shouldered by literary circles and publishers. In Isernia, he worked as a lawyer and acted as president of the tourist board of his home region, Molise. In 1968, he regained attention with his last novel Il Tratturo (The trailing).
Italy