The famous little man, tall, slender, with a crooked nose, egg-shaped eyes, red jacket, bowler hat and wide white trousers, born from Sergio Tofano's pen, before forging the contours with his imagination, seems to have existed. The little man seemed to have a name and a surname: his name was Ildebrando Bonaventura. When they told him about him in Tofano, it was 1917, in the middle of the world war. Sergio Tofano, a Roman, graduated in literature and dreamed of becoming an actor, had stayed in Rome during the first war, assigned to the army censorship office. In the spring of 1917 he heard that in the front line, on the slopes of Mount Ortigara, among the officers, there was a very young and original lieutenant: his name was Ildebrando Bonaventura of Treviso. Bonaventura came from a wealthy family of landowners, and this sets him apart from his companions. The lieutenant carried with him, even at the front, a small brown dachshund dog, from which he never strayed and with which he climbed the steep mule tracks with him and soon the dachshund became the battalion's mascot. The image of Lieutenant Bonaventura and his faithful friend intent on climbing the plateau to take up a position in the Italian trenches perhaps inspired Tofano with the fateful phrase: "And here begins the misfortune of Mr Bonaventura" and who can say?
The Roman cartoonist tells that, remembering the lieutenant and the dachshund, he worked on fantasy and proposed them in the form of comic characters, with the signature of “Sto”, to the then director of the Corriere dei Piccoli for a series of funny cartoon pictures. Bonaventura, who expressed himself through nursery rhymes much loved by children, appeared for the first time in Corriere dei Piccoli n.43 in October 1917 and from that moment on he entered the hearts of young and old (since Corriere dei Piccoli was a supplement to Corriere Della Sera). And there began the fortune of that gentleman, “now so rich as to be afraid”, who, at the end of every story, showed the gigantic million (later brought to a billion). The character was the answer to Frederick Burr Opper's (Happy Hooligan) unfortunate fortune. This comic character remained the undisputed protagonist for half a century on the pages of “Corrierino” and then inspired several sketches of Carosello, a cartoon TV series.
More details:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signor_Bonaventura
