49 Facts About Giorgio Napolitano

1.

Giorgio Napolitano is an Italian politician who served as president of Italy from 2006 to 2015, the first to be re-elected to the office.

2.

Giorgio Napolitano was a longtime member of the Italian Communist Party and of its post-Communist social democratic successors, from the Democratic Party of the Left onwards.

3.

Giorgio Napolitano was a leading member of a modernizing faction on the right of the party.

4.

Giorgio Napolitano was Minister of the Interior from 1996 to 1998 under Romano Prodi.

5.

Giorgio Napolitano was appointed a Senator for life in 2005 by President Carlo Azeglio Ciampi.

6.

Giorgio Napolitano, in keeping with his constitutional role, then asked former EU commissioner Mario Monti to form a cabinet which was referred to as a "government of the president" by critics.

7.

When his seven-year presidential term expired in April 2013, Giorgio Napolitano reluctantly accepted re-election, becoming the first President of Italy to serve a second term, to safeguard the continuity of the country's institutions during the parliamentary deadlock that followed the 2013 general election.

8.

When Letta handed in his resignation on 14 February 2014, Giorgio Napolitano mandated Matteo Renzi to form a new government.

9.

Giorgio Napolitano was often accused by his critics of having transformed a largely ceremonial role into a political and executive one, becoming, during the years of his tenure, the real kingmaker of Italian politics.

10.

Giorgio Napolitano's father Giovanni was a liberal lawyer and poet, while his mother was Carolina Bobbio, a descendant of a noble Piedmontese family.

11.

Giorgio Napolitano played in a comedy by Salvatore Di Giacomo at Teatro Mercadante in Naples.

12.

Giorgio Napolitano dreamt of being an actor and spent his early years performing in several productions at the Teatro Mercadante.

13.

Giorgio Napolitano has often been cited as the author of a collection of sonnets in Neapolitan dialect published under a pseudonym, Tommaso Pignatelli, and entitled Pe cupia 'o chiarfo.

14.

Giorgio Napolitano denied this in 1997 and, again, on the occasion of his presidential election, when his staff described the attribution of authorship to Napolitano as a "journalistic myth".

15.

Giorgio Napolitano published his first acknowledged book, entitled Movimento Operaio e Industria di Stato, in 1962.

16.

In 1944, along with the group of Neapolitan Communists, as Mario Palermo and Maurizio Valenzi, Giorgio Napolitano prepared the arrival in Naples of Palmiro Togliatti, the long-time leader of the Italian Communist Party who was in exile since 1926 when the Communist Party of Italy was banned by the Italian Fascist government, and Togliatti was one of few leaders not to be arrested, as he was attending a meeting of the Comintern in Moscow.

17.

Giorgio Napolitano became a member of the Secretariat of the Italian Economic Centre for Southern Italy in 1946, which was represented by Senator Paratore, where he remained for two years.

18.

Giorgio Napolitano played a major role in the Movement for the Rebirth of Southern Italy for over ten years.

19.

Giorgio Napolitano was first elected to the Chamber of Deputies in 1953 for the electoral district of Naples, and was reelected in every election until 1996.

20.

Giorgio Napolitano was elected to the National Committee of the party during its eighth national congress in 1956, largely thanks to the support offered by Palmiro Togliatti, who wanted to involve younger politicians in the central direction of the party.

21.

Giorgio Napolitano became responsible for the commission for Southern Italy within the National Committee.

22.

Giorgio Napolitano complied with the party-sponsored position on this matter, a choice he would repeatedly declare to have become uncomfortable with, developing what his autobiography describes as a "grievous self-critical torment".

23.

Between 1963 and 1966, Giorgio Napolitano was party chairman in the city of Naples and later, between 1966 and 1969, he was appointed as chairman of the secretary's office and of the political office.

24.

Giorgio Napolitano's political thought was somewhat moderate in the context of the PCI: in fact, he became the leader of the wing of the party called Migliorismo, whose members notably included Gerardo Chiaromonte and Emanuele Macaluso.

25.

Between 1977 and 1981 Giorgio Napolitano had some secret meetings with the United States ambassador Richard Gardner, at a time when the PCI was seeking contact with the US administration, in the context of its definitive break with its past relationship with the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the beginning of eurocommunism, the attempt to develop a theory and practice more adapted to the democratic countries of Western Europe.

26.

Giorgio Napolitano was an active member of the party until it ended in 1991.

27.

Thanks to this role and in part by the good offices of Giulio Andreotti, in the 1980s Giorgio Napolitano was able to travel to the United States and give lectures at Aspen, Colorado and at Harvard University.

28.

Giorgio Napolitano has since visited and lectured in the United States several times.

29.

In July 1989 Giorgio Napolitano became Foreign Minister in the PCI shadow government, from which he resigned the day after the Congress of Rimini, where advocates for processing into Democratic Party of the Left.

30.

Giorgio Napolitano was the first former Communist to hold the office, a role traditionally occupied by Christian Democrats.

31.

Giorgio Napolitano remained Minister of the Interior until October 1998, when Prodi's government lost its majority in the Parliament.

32.

Giorgio Napolitano served a second term as an MEP from 1999 to 2004 as member of the Party of European Socialists.

33.

Yet, when Giorgio Napolitano was elected, Silvio Berlusconi gave an interview to one of his political magazines Panorama saying that the UDC betrayed him by letting 60 of his electors cast a blank vote on the first ballot, instead of supporting the official candidate Gianni Letta.

34.

On 9 July 2006, Giorgio Napolitano was present at the FIFA World Cup final, in which the Italian team defeated France and won its fourth World Cup, and afterwards he joined the players' celebrations.

35.

Giorgio Napolitano is the second President of the Italian Republic to be present at a FIFA World Cup final won by the Italian team, after Sandro Pertini in 1982.

36.

On 26 September 2006, Giorgio Napolitano made an official visit to Budapest, Hungary, where he paid tribute to the fallen in the 1956 revolution, which he initially opposed as member of the Italian Communist Party, by laying a wreath at Imre Nagy's grave.

37.

On 10 February 2007 a diplomatic crisis arose between Italy and Croatia after President Giorgio Napolitano made an official speech during the celebration of the National Memorial Day of the Exiles and Foibe in which he stated:.

38.

On 21 February 2007, Prime Minister Romano Prodi submitted his resignation after losing a foreign policy vote in the Parliament; Giorgio Napolitano held talks with the political groups in parliament, and on 24 February rejected the resignation, prompting Prodi to ask for a new vote of confidence.

39.

President Giorgio Napolitano summoned Bertinotti and Marini, the two Speakers of the Houses of the Italian Parliament, acknowledging the end of the legislature, on 5 February 2008.

40.

On 7 May 2008, President Giorgio Napolitano appointed Silvio Berlusconi as Prime Minister, following his landslide victory in the general election.

41.

On 6 February 2009, President Giorgio Napolitano refused to sign an emergency decree made by the Berlusconi government in order to suspend a final court sentence allowing suspension of nutrition to 38-year-old coma patient Eluana Englaro; the decree could not be enacted by Berlusconi.

42.

Giorgio Napolitano reluctantly agreed to serve for another term in order to safeguard the continuity of the country's institutions.

43.

Giorgio Napolitano was easily re-elected on 20 April 2013, receiving 738 of the 1007 possible votes, and was sworn in on 22 April 2013 after a speech when he asked for constitutional and electoral reforms.

44.

On 24 April 2013, Giorgio Napolitano gave to the vice-secretary of the Democratic Party, Enrico Letta, the task of forming a government, having determined that Pier Luigi Bersani, leader of the winning coalition Italy Common Good, could not form a government because it did not have a majority in the Senate.

45.

Giorgio Napolitano became the new Secretary of the Democratic Party and the centre-left's prospective candidate for Prime Minister.

46.

Giorgio Napolitano's victory was welcomed by Prime Minister Enrico Letta, who had been the Vice Secretary of the party under Bersani's leadership.

47.

Giorgio Napolitano's Cabinet became Italy's youngest government to date, with an average age of 47.

48.

On 30 January 2014, the Five Star Movement deposited an impeachment accusing Giorgio Napolitano of harming the Italian Constitution, to allow unconstitutional laws and in relation to the State-Mafia Pact.

49.

Giorgio Napolitano officially resigned on 14 January 2015, after the end of the six-month Italian presidency of the EU.