Mario Calabresi was born in Milan in 1970. His father, Commissioner Luigi Calabresi, was assassinated by left-wing terrorists when he was only two years old, his middle brother was a year old, and his youngest brother was still in the womb of his 25-year old mother. He enrolled at the State University of Milan, where he studied Law and then History. He then went on to the Carlo de Martino journalism institute in Milan. In 1998, he joined ANSA as a parliamentary journalist and then in 1999 he became part of the political team at the newspaper La Repubblica. From 2000 to 2002, he worked at La Stampa where, as a special envoy, he reported on the September 11, 2001 attacks. In 2002, he returned to La Repubblica as deputy editor-in-chief, and in 2007 he became the New York correspondent where he reported on the 2008 electoral campaign and the irresistible rise of Barack Obama. In 2007, he also published Pushing past the night (2007), a book dedicated to victims of terrorism in which he tells the story of his family, filled with equal bouts of emotion and composure. The book was adapted for the stage by Luca Zingaretti. In 2009, aged 39, he was headhunted by John Elkann to take Giulio Anselmi's place at the helm of La Stampa. In the same year, he published La fortuna non esiste. Storia di donne e di uomini che hanno avuto il coraggio di rialzarsi. (Luck doesn’t exist. Stories of women and men who had to courage to pick themselves up) (2009). He has won a number of journalism awards during his illustrious career, including the Angelo Rizzoli award, in 2002, along with Francesca Senette and Andrea Galdi, in 2003 the Carlo Casalegno award and in 2009, the Ischia Prize for Journalist of the Year. He is married to Caterina Ginzburg, granddaughter of Natalia Ginzburg. "My recipe? I work a lot, I really work a lot. If I think about the last 30 years, I don't see my life as a film; I always worked putting in a lot of passion. And every time, focusing on what I was doing. My dream as a child was to be a correspondent in the United States. I have an archive of American electoral campaigns dating back to 1984, when I was only 14. I got there when I was 37... I have always focused a lot on what I had to do, I did not keep thinking or saying that I had to do something else. I think it's important to have a method, to do things with passion and to keep cultivating one's interests in journalism, even if they don't coincide with what you are working on."