Sandro Pertini
Sandro Pertini spent fourteen years in fascist prisons and internal exile and became, at eighty-two, the most popular head of state Italy has had. He was a socialist from Liguria, decorated as an infantry officer in the first war, and he began opposing fascism early enough to be sentenced for it in 1925. He escaped to France, came back under a false name, was caught, and spent the years to 1943 between a cell and a prison island, refusing on principle the pardon his mother petitioned for on the ground that accepting it would concede that there was something to pardon. Released when the regime fell, he was captured by the Germans, condemned to death, broken out by partisans, and ended the war directing the insurrection that took Milan in April 1945. He came to the presidency in July 1978, weeks after his predecessor resigned and months after the murder that had preceded it, and was elected on the sixteenth ballot with more than four fifths of the college, which had run out of alternatives and settled on the one man nobody could accuse of anything. He then did something no Italian president had done, which was to behave as though the office were a platform rather than a formality. He attacked the parties for corruption and the state for tolerating the mafia, in plain language, on television, while in office. The defining episode was the earthquake of November 1980 in the mountains east of Naples, which killed nearly three thousand people. He went there, found that almost no help had arrived three days later, and broadcast that night an unscripted address blaming the state in terms no head of state uses about his own government. Ministers resigned. It fixed the presidency for a generation as the office from which the country could be defended against the people governing it, and it is the reason his successors are measured against a man who held the job in his eighties.
- Lived: 1896 CE – 1990 CE
- Nationality: Italian
- Roles: head_of_state, politician
