Carlo Azeglio Ciampi

Biography

Carlo Azeglio Ciampi was born in Livorno in 1920. He studied literature at Leipzig in 1940-1941 and took a degree in classics at the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa in 1941. Called up as an officer in Albania, he refused to serve the Italian Social Republic after the 1943 armistice, crossed the lines to Bari and joined the Action Party and the Resistance. In 1946 he married Franca Pilla, took a law degree at the University of Pisa and joined the Bank of Italy.

Ciampi rose through the bank's central administration to secretary general in 1973, director general in 1978 and governor from October 1979 to 1993, a period that included a lira devaluation amid friction with Bettino Craxi and Italy's withdrawal from the European Monetary System in 1992.

In April 1993, with the old party system collapsing under the Tangentopoli scandals, President Scalfaro made him the first non-parliamentarian prime minister in over a century, at the head of a technocratic government that lasted until May 1994. As treasury and budget minister from 1996 to 1999 under Romano Prodi and Massimo D'Alema he steered Italy into the euro and chose the Vitruvian Man for the Italian one-euro coin; he also chaired the IMF's Interim Committee.

Elected president on the first ballot in May 1999, he served until May 2006, staying above party politics while clashing at times with Silvio Berlusconi. He declined a second term, sat in the Senate as a life senator, and died in Rome in 2016.