He is an Italian mystery writer and playwright. He worked also a theatre impresario, actor and playwright. As a writer, his most famous character is Sarti Antonio[1] (surname written first), a Bolognese police detective, characterized by a strong morality but mediocre investigative capabilities; in his tales he is often helped by the sharper mind of Rosas, a smart university student. Sarti's stories have been turned into a television series in 1991, followed by an Italian-German co-production of six films, broadcast in April and May 1994. He was also the protagonist of a comics series published in the Italian magazine Orient Express. More recently, Macchiavelli has written a series of detective novels in collaboration with singer-songwriter Francesco Guccini having a Carabinieri maresciallo, Benedetto Santovito, as the protagonist. Machiavelli's books have been published in France, Germany, Portugal, Spain, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Soviet Union, Japan, Romania and other countries.