Cronaca Vera

The magazine was founded in 1969 by entrepreneur Sergio Garassini, who had launched the monthly erotic magazine Kent.^[1] Garassini appointed Antonio Perria, crime author and former ABC editor who had also worked at L'Unità as a crime reporter, to be the periodical's first editor-in-chief.^[2] The graphic illustrator and comics artist Maurizio Bovarini^[3] was entrusted with the design of Cronaca,^[4] while he also, in the same year, started working as editor at the Italian edition of Hara-Kiri magazine.^[5]

The magazine is printed in "low-quality paper" and is sold retail for one euro. An issue typically contains from about a dozen up to fifteen reports ranging from local news to crime, from stories of everyday violence to controversies. It contains columns such as Il Racconto Giallo/Nero (Tales of Yellow/Black)^{[note 2]} with crime stories, or I Misteri del Sesso (The Mysteries of Sex), where readers write in about their sexual problems. Its titles, in "jarring yellows and reds,"^[6] are considered by Vice magazine to be "wonderful."^[6]

Cronaca Vera is considered "a lurid tabloid" by some critics,^[7] although its covers are for others "unmissable",^[8] while for the mayoralty of Ribera, Agrigento, the magazine is "prestigious."^[9]

In the mid-1970s, Cronaca was selling approximately 600 thousand issues every week. Editor-in-chief Giuseppe Biselli contends that the magazine receives "approximately 20,000 letters" from readers every year.^[4] He agrees with the finding that it is the most popular publication among prison inmates.^[4]

• ABC
• L'Espresso
• Oggi
• Panorama