[1][2][3][4] Giampaolo Pansa was born and raised in Casale Monferrato, Italy, an industrial town by the Po river, located in the province of Alessandria, in Piedmont.
The young Giampaolo developed a close relationship with his grandmother, Caterina Zaffiro, who was born in 1869 in the little village of Caresana located north of the Po river.
[8] Pansa completed his university studies on 16 July 1959 with a degree in Political Sciences, submitting a dissertation titled 'The Resistance in the Province of Alessandria (1943–1945)'.
[10] The novelist's work on the wartime antifascist resistance also earned him the "Einaudi Prize", worth 500,000 lire and brought him to the attention of the editors and owners at the prestigious Turin-based daily newspaper, La Stampa.
[24] In his biography, Pansa presented a case for the creator of Repubblica demonstrating political bias and, on occasion, heightened self-regard; he also paid tribute to the sheer genius and total dedication to work, which he saw as among of his old boss's formidable array of qualities.
[27] He nevertheless refused to join in with the more virulent aspects of the campaign that ensued: he refused, for example, to be join the 757 politicians, journalists and "intellectuals" who signed the angry Open letter of June 1971, targeting (the subsequently assassinated) Police Commissioner Calabresi following the (never explained) death of the alleged bomb suspect Giuseppe Pinelli in police custody, and the associated cover-up.
[35] Pansa did not spare his fellow journalists: in 1980 he published as article in la Repubblica under the headline "Il giornalista dimezzato" (loosely, "journalism trashed"), in which he castigated what he perceived as the hypocritical conduct of colleagues, who, in his words, "surrendered half of their own professionalism to the party".
[36][b] Reports of Pansa's retirement from L'Espresso on 30 September 2008 tend to explained it not by pointing out that the move came the day before his seventy-third birthday, but by quoting his justification that he found himself opposed to the magazine's editorial line.
[37][38] While Giampaolo Pansa focused primarily on publishing novels and historical essays during his final twelve years, he still contributed to political magazines and newspapers, principally as listed below: He later attributed his decision to leave La Verità in 2018 to what he saw as the paper's "Northern League" drift, while insisting that he had himself always enjoyed complete freedom from the editor to write what he wished.
[10][43] In "Le notti dei fuochi" ("Nights of fire"), published in 2001, Pansa explored the critical period between 1919 and 1922, covering the birth of the Squadrismo movement, Mussolini's March on Rome, and the inauguration of Fascism.
Despite appearing more than half a century after the events described, there was an element of uneasy shock discernible beneath even in the positive critical reaction which came primarily from representatives of mainstream intellectual centre-left.
[citation needed][48][e] Pansa had turned for his sources to authorities such as Giorgio Pisanò as Antonio Serena: there were also many personal stories from those who might be identified, in terms of the series title, as the "vanquished".
Pansa's historiographical approach with the six volume cycle was in aggregate unconventional, described by one source as a mixture of "historical novel", serious "Feuilleton commentary" and political polemic.
[51] There were allegations that Blood of the vanquished represented little more than a device intended to attract further editorial commissions from the Berlusconi media empire, while others asserted that the author had merely recycled and embellished incidents and events that had already been identified and recorded by others.
There are reports of book launches at which Pansa found himself engaged in savage discussions about his Blood of the vanquished cycle, not just with members of the far-left but also by "academics" who charged him with the crime of "revisionism".
[57] There were also more nuanced reactions such as that of Ernesto Galli della Loggia, who reacted positively to Pansa's contributions, but still wondered in print what it said about the Italians that people were generally content to ignore many historical crimes for years on end, only taking an interest and providing opinions when a high-profile intellectual from the political left, such as Giampaolo Pansa, placed some such matters on the public agenda.
[58] Even the historian Sergio Luzzatto, whose initial bemusement over Blood of the vanquished had translated into a harsh negativity, later came round to an acceptance that the series contained "nothing made up" and demonstrated a reassuring "respect for history".