Guido Morselli

Giovanni, his father, was a manager of Carlo Erba, a pharmaceutical firm, while his mother, Olga Vincenzi, was the daughter of one of the most prestigious lawyers in Bologna.

The absence of his mother had a strong impact on Guido's personality, also due to his father's frequent travels; when Olga died in 1924, the loss struck the twelve-year-old boy powerfully.

He studied law at the Università Statale di Milano to please his authoritarian father, but he started writing short journalistic essays without even trying to have them published.

After the death of his beloved sister Luisa in 1938, Guido managed to obtain life income from his father which enabled him to devote himself to those activities he really loved: reading, researching, and writing.

While Il comunista is a solid realistic novel which analyses the existential crisis of a Communist Party cadre in the 1960s, Past Conditional belongs to the genre of alternate histories, inasmuch as it tells the counterfactual story of how the Austrian Empire won the Great War (by defeating Italy using blitzkrieg tactics well before their time).