Giovanni Spadolini

Senator for Life Giovanni Spadolini
President of the Senate of the Republic
In office 2 July 1987 – 14 April 1994
Preceded by	Giovanni Malagodi
Succeeded by	Carlo Scognamiglio
Prime Minister of Italy
In office 28 June 1981 – 1 December 1982
President	Sandro Pertini
Preceded by	Arnaldo Forlani
Succeeded by	Amintore Fanfani
Acting President of Italy
In office 28 April 1992 – 28 May 1992
Prime Minister	Giulio Andreotti
Preceded by	Francesco Cossiga
Succeeded by	Oscar Luigi Scalfaro
Ministerial offices Minister of Defence In office 4 August 1983 – 18 April 1987 Prime Minister Bettino Craxi Preceded by Lelio Lagorio Succeeded by Remo Gaspari Minister of Public Education In office 21 March 1979 – 5 August 1979 Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti Preceded by Mario Pedini Succeeded by Salvatore Valitutti Minister for Cultural Heritage and the Environment In office 21 December 1974 – 12 February 1976 Prime Minister Aldo Moro Preceded by Office established Succeeded by Mario Pedini
Parliamentary offices Member of the Senate of the Republic Life tenure 2 May 1991 – 4 August 1994 Nominated by Francesco Cossiga In office 25 May 1972 – 1 May 1991 Constituency Milan
Personal details
Born	(1925-06-21)21 June 1925 Florence, Kingdom of Italy
Died	4 August 1994(1994-08-04) (aged 69) Rome, Italy
Political party	Italian Republican Party
Height	1.80 m (5 ft 11 in)
Alma mater	University of Florence
Profession	Teacher, journalist, historian

Giovanni Spadolini (21 June 1925 – 4 August 1994) was an Italian politician and statesman, who served as the 44th prime minister of Italy. He had been a leading figure in the Republican Party and the first head of a government to not be a member of Christian Democrats since 1945. He was also a newspaper editor, journalist and historian. He is considered a highly respected intellectual for his literary works and his cultural dimension.

Professor of Contemporary History at the University of Florence, he was the author of numerous historical works. He was also a journalist and editor-in-chief of the Bolognese newspaper Il Resto del Carlino, then of the Milanese newspaper Il Corriere della Sera.

Spadolini was the first Italian Minister of Cultural Heritage and Environment from 1974 to 1976. He became Prime Minister in 1981 and he led two successive cabinets which were supported by a coalition of parties in Parliament but this only lasted a few months. He was Minister of Defence in the governments headed by Socialist leader Bettino Craxi from 1983 to 1987 before being elected President of the Senate. In 1991, Spadolini was appointed Lifetime Senator by President Francesco Cossiga.

Early life

Spadolini was born into a bourgeois family: his father Guido Spadolini was a Macchiaioli painter, owner of a large library in which the young Giovanni studied and began to form his culture inspired by secular, liberal-democratic and republican values. He was an assiduous student, brilliant in all subjects, at Liceo Classico Statale Galileo. He published his first article in 1944 in Italia e Civiltà ("Italy and Civilisation"), a fascist periodical critical of the excesses of fascism in which the idealist philosopher Giovanni Gentile also collaborated.

During the post-war period (from 1945 to 1950) Spadolini became a moderate liberal conservative. He also rejected antisemitism in favour of Zionism. He studied law at the University of Florence and shortly after graduation was appointed Professor of Contemporary History in the Faculty of Political Science. He also became a political columnist for several newspapers, such as Il Borghese, Il Messaggero and Il Mondo, becoming editor-in-chief of the Bologna paper Il Resto del Carlino in 1955, doubling its circulation during his tenure. In 1968, Spadolini moved to Milan where he took over the editorship of Italy's largest newspaper, Corriere della Sera, a position he held until 1972. In that year, he was elected as a senator, going on to serve as minister of the environment and then minister of education. Then in 1979, he was appointed secretary of the small but powerful Italian Republican Party (PRI).

As a journalist, he sometimes used the pseudonym Giovanni dalle Bande Nere (Giovanni of the Black Bands).

Prime Minister of Italy

Spadolini (far right) with other national leaders during the G7 summit in 1981

He served as Prime Minister of Italy from 1981 to 1982, the first PM since 1945 not to be a member of the Christian Democrats. He pledged to fight corruption (in particular a scandal involving certain Italian political figures connected with a Masonic lodge known as P2) and mounting terrorist violence.

In foreign policy, he was a non-interventionist but also moderately Americanist. In particular, he shifted away from Italy's previous pro-Arab policy, refusing to meet Yasser Arafat during his official visit to Italy to protest the murder of Stefano Gaj Taché, an Italian Jewish child, by PLO terrorists, and suggesting that the Bologna train station bombing may have been perpetrated by the PLO and Gaddafi's Libya, in spite of a majority accusing neo-fascists.

In 1982, after a political crisis between the Minister of the Treasury Beniamino Andreatta (DC) and the Minister of Finance Rino Formica (PSI), Spadolini resigned and formed a new cabinet identical to the former, which collapsed in November when Bettino Craxi's Socialist Party withdrew its support.

Later life

Under his leadership, the PRI obtained 5% of all votes for the first time in the 1983 Italian general election. From 1987 to April 1994, he was president of the Italian Senate. He became Acting President of Italy on 28 April 1992, upon the resignation of then President Francesco Cossiga, for a month. Following the electoral success of Silvio Berlusconi's Forza Italia, he lost the chairmanship of the Senate to Carlo Scognamiglio Pasini by a single vote.

Personal life and death

Spadolini never married. In July 1994 he had a stomach operation. He died of respiratory failure in Rome in August 1994.

Electoral history

Election	House	Constituency	Party		Votes	Result
1972	Senate of the Republic	Milan I		PRI	7,231	Y Elected
1976	Senate of the Republic	Milan I		PRI	6,862	Y Elected
1979	Senate of the Republic	Milan IV		PRI	10,134	Y Elected
1983	Senate of the Republic	Milan I		PRI	13,405	Y Elected
1987	Senate of the Republic	Milan I		PRI	7,745	Y Elected

External links

• Media related to Giovanni Spadolini at Wikimedia Commons