Giorgio Napolitanothe first and only former leader of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) to be elected president of the Republic, has died this Friday, at the age of 98, at the Salvador Mundi clinic in the Italian capital. In addition to being head of state, Napolitano had been a deputy, MEP, president of Congress and Minister of the Interior. His condition had seriously worsened in the middle of this week.
Napolitano has been, without a doubt, one of the most influential figures of recent decades for the Italian left. Born in Naples in 1925, he had founded, at the age of 17 and in the midst of Benito Mussolini’s dictatorship, a group of antifascist armed resistance who took part in numerous actions against the Nazis. However, the most warlike side of him was extinguished by the war and, once the conflict was over, he had studied englishlater becoming a moderate jurist who came to advocate a great alliance of the PCI with the social democrats of the Italian Socialist Party (PSI).
With this, in 1956, he defended the Soviet occupation of Hungary, which he later rejected. And he had married civilly, even upsetting his mother-in-law by denying baptism to her children, although he later said he felt sorry. “great respect and attention for believers”. Even so, his atypicality also earned him some enemies within the PCI because, they said then, he did not want to save the world, but only for things to work a little better.
“I admire you”
The fall of the USSR and the dismemberment of the PCI were his revenge and Napolitano—also for his elegance—became known as “King Giorgio,” as the press also called him. A fame that was also increased by the controversial magnate and politician Silvio Berlusconi, for whom the former communist also became a firewall.
“I admire you”the American even said of him Barack Obama, president of a country who had gone so far as to deny Napolitano a visa for being a communist, although his main books are today in several universities in the United States. A convinced Europeanist also had numerous friendships among the intellectuals of his time.
His notoriety reached such a level in Italy that in 2013, on the verge of turning 88 and when he hoped to finally be able to dedicate himself to his grandchildren, They asked him to repeat as president, because the then parties were unable to reach sufficient consensus to find a successor. It happened even after Napolitano had given his last public speech, spent his last weekend as head of state and made his last official trip abroad.
Neruda
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Napolitano accepted the “extreme sacrifice” to continue leading the presidency of Italy, but not before giving a very tough speech before Parliament in which he demanded that everyone “responsibility” out “shared and collective”. Previously, his big coup had been to break Berlusconi and force him to resign, when in 2011 Italy was under attack by the financial markets, which brought Professor Mario Monti to power, with the support of Europe.
On the personal front, he was also a personal friend of the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda and one of the personalities who in 1951 They avoided his expulsion from Italy and they helped the publication of one of his capital works, “The Captain’s Verses.” This perhaps also stems from Napolitano’s two great secret passions: directing theatrical performances and write sonnets.