[2] He moved to Turin in 1972 to join Fiat and was appointed president of the Fondazione Agnelli in 1975 but was obliged to resign because of his open support for the Italian Communist Party.

[2] His first novel, Memoriale (1962), describes the atmosphere of growing violence in a factory environment and in society as seen through the eyes of a working man, leading to his alienation and gradual descent into madness.

Its tragic main character, a peasant-philosopher living in the Marche region, has been described as "surely one of the most bewilderingly pathetic figures in contemporary Italian fiction".

Il sipario ducale (1975), with which he won the Viareggio Prize in 1975 for the second time, marked a return to a more traditional form with a story told against the background of a bomb attack in Piazza Fontana, Milan in 1969.

Il pianeta irritabile (1978) is an allegorical story set in 2293 where four characters – a baboon, an elephant, a goose and a dwarf – escape a final explosion and wander off looking for a safe kingdom, encountering traps and terrifying obstacles, in a perpetual guerrilla activity whose scenes take place under diluvian rains that threaten to engulf the whole planet.