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Michele Giuttari

Michele Giuttari

(Born in 1950 in Messina, Italy.)

Michele Giuttari is a former head of the Florence Flying Squad
Michele Giuttari is a former head of
the Florence Flying Squad
Michele Giuttari, author of a crime thriller series featuring Vice Questore (Chief Superintendent) Michele Ferrara of the Squadra Mobile (Flying Squad) unit of the Florence police, could not be better qualified to write about the work of that elite group of officers: he was head of the unit in real life.

Born in the province of Messina in the northeast corner of Sicily, Giuttari graduated in law from the University of Messina in 1975, qualified to practise as a lawyer two years later and in 1978 began his career in the Polizia di Stato. 

He held positions on the Italian mainland at Reggio Calabria and Cosenza before becoming an anti-Mafia investigator in Naples, helping in the fight against the Camorra.

Giuttari’s reposting to Florence followed the 1993 car bombing outside the Uffizi art gallery, which killed five people and injured 48, as well as destroying a number of paintings.  The bombing was part of a campaign of intimidation by the Sicilian Mafia in response to the capture of their boss, Salvatore ‘Toto’ Riina, earlier in the year and his allegedly harsh treatment in jail. 

As well as his success in identifying those guilty of ordering and carrying out the bombing, Giuttari was responsible for reopening the investigation into the so-called Monster of Florence, the suspected serial killer blamed for the deaths of 16 people - eight courting couples - in secluded countryside areas outside the city between 1968 and 1985. The case has never been fully solved, but Giuttari’s work led to an acceptance that the murders, though linked, were not committed by one individual operating alone.

Giuttari’s detective, Michele Ferrara, first appeared in Italy in 2004 in Scarabeo and for English-speaking audiences in 2007 in A Florentine Death.

The author, who admits that the character of Ferrara is based closely on himself, still has a home in Florence, close to the Ponte Vecchio, but spends most of his time at his house in Germany. Interviewed in 2015, he said that he finds the Italian tourist hotspot is too noisy and crowded nowadays to be conducive to writing.


The Michele Ferrara novels:

1.      A Florentine Death (2007) Review
2.      A Death In Tuscany (2008)
3.      The Death of a Mafia Don (2009)
4.      A Death in Calabria (2010)
5.      The Black Rose Of Florence (2012)
6.      The Dark Heart of Florence  (2013)
7.      Death Under a Tuscan Sun (2015)

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