Eugenio Scalfari
Powerful Left-wing journalist who waged war on Silvio Berlusconi and founded La Repubblica
EUGENIO SCALFARI, who has died aged 98, was one of the most powerful Italian journalists of the 20th century and attracted the kind of reverence usually reserved for the leaders of religious cults.
Never a member of Italy’s Communist Party – the largest in Europe outside the Soviet Bloc before the fall of the Berlin Wall – Scalfari nevertheless became the guru of the Italian Left and scourge of Right-wing politicians such as the media tycoon and four-time premier Silvio Berlusconi. Not long before his death, Scalfari confessed that one of the few times he cried in his life was when the leader of Italy’s Communist Party, Enrico Berlinguer, died in 1984.
In 1955, he co-founded L’espresso,a weekly current affairs magazine similar in style to Paris Match, which during its heyday sold hundreds of thousands of copies. In 1976, he founded La Repubblica – Italy’s equivalent of The Guardian – which after a shaky start became so successful that it equalled and sometimes overtook Corriere della Sera as Italy’s biggest-selling daily newspaper.
To mark his death, La Repubblica published a 24-page supplement dedicated to “Il Fondatore”, as he was nicknamed, which described him as an economist, newspaper inventor, entrepreneur, politician, philosopher, novelist and poet. Roberto Benigni, the Italian radical chics’ favourite comedian, said that going for dinner with Scalfari was like going for dinner with Kant.
That Scalfari played such a dominant role in the Italian media and on the Italian Left might seem extraordinary given that, during the Second World War, he was news editor of the fascist student newspaper Roma Fascista. Yet like so many Italians of his era he was able to switch effortlessly, after the defeat of Benito Mussolini’s dictatorship in 1945, from devout fascist to devout anti-fascist.
In old age, Scalfari, a lifelong atheist and fierce critic of the Catholic Church, had three meetings with Pope Francis, who spoke of the pain he felt at the death of a lay friend. The Italian prime minister Mario Draghi said Scalfari’s death had left an unfillable void in Italy’s public life as his articles were essential reading. Even his arch-enemy Berlusconi tweeted: “I cannot but recognise that he was a great journalist and editor.” The Italian senate held a minute’s silence in his honour.
Eugenio Scalfari was born on April 6 1924 in the port city of Civitavecchia, near Rome, an only child of Calabrian parents. His father had marched as a legionnaire with the nationalist poet-warrior Gabriele D’annunzio to take the city of Fiume in 1919 in what was a dress rehearsal for Mussolini’s March on Rome in 1922 to seize power.
The family moved to San Remo, on the Riviera near the French frontier, when his father got a job as a manager at the casino there. Scalfari took a degree in Law, beginning at nearby Genoa University but completed at Sapienza in Rome.
After the war, he worked for a brief spell in a casino like his father, and then in a bank, but in 1949 turned to journalism, writing about the economy, mainly for the Left-wing weeklies, Il Mondo and L’europeo. It was with Arrigo Benedetti, the much older editor of L’europeo who had become his mentor, that he cofounded L’espresso in 1955 with the backing of one of Italy’s most important entrepreneurs, Adriano Olivetti.
L’espresso – whose name they took from the French magazine L’express
– quickly became a success with a mix of serious reportage and investigations, light-hearted stories about the rich and famous, impressive photography, and columns by wellknown authors. Initially, Scalfari was managing editor and wrote only about the economy, but in 1963 he became editor as well, a job he gave up to serve as a Socialist Party (PSI) MP from 1968 to 1972.
In those early years, Scalfari lived a life very like that of the journalist immortalised by Marcello Mastroianni in Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita and spent much of his time when not at work at the celebrated Caffé Rosati in the Via Veneto. He would later boast that he once stole a girlfriend from Fellini, and laughed at his friend Italo Calvino when he ran way from a brothel in horror.
But “La Dolce Vita” of the late 1950s and early 1960s gave way after 1968 to Gli Anni di Piombo (“the Years of Lead”) which saw Italy ravaged by largely Left-wing terrorism. In June 1971, at the height of the atrocities which brought Italy’s Communist Party to the brink of power, L’espresso published an open letter accusing a police inspector and others of killing an anarchist who fell to his death from a fourth-floor window while in police custody in Milan (an incident explored by Dario Fo in his play Accidental Death of an Anarchist).
Scalfari signed the letter, alongside 750 politicians, journalists and intellectuals, including the film director Bernardo Bertolucci. The letter was widely criticised as an incitement to murder, and indeed in May 1972 communist terrorists shot dead the police inspector as he walked to work.
In 2017, Scalfari publicly expressed to the police officer’s widow his deep regret for having signed the letter.
Scalfari’s dream had always been to found a daily newspaper, and during a summer thunderstorm in 1975, he signed the document that would launch La Repubblica in January 1976, funded by the profits from L’espresso and by the publishing giant Mondadori.
The idea was to give voice to, and nurture, an alternative to that of the two enemy faiths: communism, which dominated the nation’s culture, and Catholicism which dominated its politics. La Repubblica, printed in the Berliner format, smaller and slimmer than the traditional broadsheet, became the totem pole for a large and growing tribe of Left-wing Italians who had abandoned communism and Catholicism but not their sense of moral superiority – the newspaper dictated what shoes, books, holidays and ideas were worthy of this new enlightened Left.
Scalfari was a narcissist who had unshakable self-confidence. He was as ruthless as he was charming and demanded that his journalists preach a clear political line in their articles, devoid of adjectives and colour, or wishy-washy conditionals such as “would” or “may”.
Once, when angry at the published product, he forced department heads to listen to a tape of the conductor Arturo Toscanini traumatising members of his orchestra.
So determined was he to stop a key journalist defecting to a rival newspaper that he once prostrated himself in front of the lift telling him: “You can leave only over my body.” The journalist decided to stay. All Scalfari needed was a quarter of an hour to convince you that, for him, you were the most important person in the world (apart from himself – he even wrote a book called Meeting With Me).
In 1989, he sold his share in La Repubblica to the industrialist Carlo De Benedetti and became a multimillionaire, while remaining editor. When Berlusconi decided to become a politician in 1994 to – as he put it – stop communism, Scalfari used his newspaper and magazine to wage war on him.
In 1996, Scalfari resigned as editor to dedicate himself to writing books, including novels, although he continued to write a Sunday column which was nicknamed the paper’s “sung mass” until shortly before his death. Nor did his resignation stop the witch-hunt against Berlusconi by La Repubblica which caused his resignation as prime minister in 2011.
In 2013, soon after his election, Pope Francis wrote Scalfari a nine-page letter in reaction to an article he had written about the gift of faith being by definition discriminatory, otherwise everyone would have faith. The letter led to the Holy Father and the last king of print journalism meeting three times, and speaking regularly on the telephone.
Scalfari wrote about these exchanges in La Repubblica, claiming among other things that the Pope had told him that Hell did not exist and that he saw Christ as Jesus of Nazareth, a man, not God incarnate – both of which views are heresy for Catholics. The Vatican has always denied that the Pope said anything of the sort.
While he used the power of his magazine and newspaper to fight for feminist causes, such as the legalisation of abortion and divorce, in his private life he was the epitome of 19th-century male chauvinism. In 1950, he married Simonetta de Benedetti, the daughter of the editor of La Stampa, but in the 1960s, began an affair with his secretary, Serena Rossetti, which his wife somehow accepted. On her deathbed in 2006 Simonetta even asked him to spray the perfume his mistress had given her on her pillow.
After her death, he married Serena in 2008. “I loved them both and I tried to divide myself fairly between them,” he said. But his daughter Enrica told Vanity Fair in 2021: “Mamma suffered like a dog, but she never made it show,” while her sister Donata remarked: “As a woman, I would never have accepted it.”
He is survived by his second wife, Serena, and his two daughters from his first marriage.