Luca Dal Monte

Biography

Two decades in the archives

Over more than two decades, Luca Dal Monte has built a body of work that returns again and again to the same question: what do the choices of ambitious, complicated people reveal about the sports — and the eras — that made them?

He had been writing since his teens, filing his first pieces for La Provincia at sixteen, but his professional path first ran through automotive communications. After a senior-year exchange at Apollo High School in Owensboro, Kentucky, and a double major in U.S. History and Political Science at the University of Kentucky (1983–1987), Dal Monte returned to Italy to become the Province of Cremona’s first Chief Press Officer. In 1991 he moved into the car industry itself, serving as Chief Press Officer for Peugeot Italy before holding senior communications roles at Toyota Motor Italy, Pirelli, Ferrari and Maserati — the vantage point from which he would eventually turn to writing full-time.

His best-known book, Ferrari Rex, occupied him for the better part of a decade. The idea took shape in the mid-1990s during conversations with motoring journalist Gino Rancati, who had known Enzo Ferrari personally; after Rancati's death, Dal Monte continued the project alone, eventually living in Modena to be close to the people and archives that could tell Ferrari's story from the inside. He conducted dozens of interviews, most of them between 2008 and 2013, and spent roughly 1,500 hours working through newspapers and periodicals by hand — research that eventually filled twenty-two notebooks and produced a finished book with more than 2,000 footnotes.

On publication in 2016, Ferrari Rex became an Amazon bestseller in Italy, won the Premio Selezione Bancarella Sport, and was shortlisted for the Royal Automobile Club's Motoring Book of the Year Award. The New York Times called it “the definitive biography” of Enzo Ferrari, and it has since been translated into half a dozen languages.

Alongside his non-fiction — which also includes Ferrari – Presunto colpevole (winner of the Premio Sandro Ciotti and the Premio Coni), La trattativa and La congiura degli innocenti — Dal Monte has written three novels and two collections of short stories exploring the human cost of a sport built on speed and risk. His first novel, La Scuderia, was published on 1 December 2009 after more than ten years in progress, and sold out its first print run within a week.

His most recent book, The Gentleman, turns to English football and the legacy of Gianluca Vialli — a player and manager, Dal Monte writes, who proved that “ambition and kindness are not opposites.”

Browse the Full Bibliography