Guido Piccoli

Originally from Turin, Guido Piccoli has lived in Naples for more than forty years. After having tried in vain to change reality – like many others of his generation – he finally decided to tell its tale, both in truth, as a professional journalist, and in fiction, as a writer of serial stories on the radio. In the 1980s, he served multiple times as the artistic director of the Naples Comics Festival, and soon became close friends with such creators as José Muñoz, Andrea Pazienza, Milo Manara, and Giuseppe Palumbo. During the same period, he also traveled to Beirut and Jerusalem, where he participated in the creation of an independent press agency and various charitable artistic projects. In 1990, he went so far as to uproot and move to Bogota, which marked the beginning of a new adventure in a country ravaged by drug wars, and marked by the hunt for the crime boss Pablo Escobar Gaviria. Piccoli would continue his activities there as a journalist and writer until the end of 1993, when Escobar was shot down in Medellín. Once back in Italy, Piccoli published several books on the drug kingpin and other bosses as well as on the bloody conflicts taking place in Colombia. When in the early 2000s the Italian radio network Rai cut its fiction programs, Piccoli turned to Rete Due in Switzerland for the creation of Don Pablo, a 20-part tale about the life and death of the boss of all bosses. These days, in addition to his radio fiction, Piccoli also creates documentaries on various Italian and international news stories. And in 2016, Piccoli published the one-shot Escobar: El Patrón with Dargaud, alongside artist Giuseppe Palumbo (Europe Comics in English, 2017).