Carlo Azeglio Ciampi obituary

In Italy politicians are even more despised than elsewhere, but Carlo Azeglio Ciampi, president of the republic from 1999 to 2006, was one of the few who escaped opprobrium. When he died at the age of 95, the praise was near-universal. Supporters of the former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi joined hands with those of the centre-left in celebrating an honest, sincere and self-effacing man who exuded integrity.

The only discordant note came from Matteo Salvini, the leader of the xenophobic Northern League, who declared that Ciampi had been, “politically speaking”, a “traitor”. Few were surprised: Salvini is given to hyperbolic pronouncements, having last year announced that the euro was a crime against humanity.

The consensus around Ciampi had been evident when he was elected head of state by members of parliament and representatives from the regions, winning in the first round with 70% of the vote. Why Ciampi? Probably because he was not a regular politician. He had not spent the best part of his life wheeling and dealing nor (like Berlusconi) had he entered politics thanks to a media empire and the vacuum created by the collapse of the party system after the political scandals of 1991-92 known as Tangentopoli (Bribesville).

Born in Livorno, on the coast of Tuscany, Carlo was the son of middle-class parents, Pietro Ciampi, an optician, and his wife, Marie (nee Masino). Carlo had a Jesuit education till the age of 18, then entered the Scuola Normale of Pisa and graduated in classics.

During the second world war he was drafted and sent to fight in Albania. After King Victor Emmanuel III ditched Mussolini and switched to the allies, Ciampi joined the resistance.

In Pisa he had met Franca Pilla, and in 1946 they married. She convinced him to abandon his idea of becoming a high school teacher and to take the examination for the Bank of Italy. He passed and by 1960 was in Rome in the bank’s research department, the Servizio Studi. In those years the ruling Christian Democrats “colonised” much of the state machine, but the bank remained fiercely independent. By 1970 Ciampi was in charge of the Servizio Studi, and in 1979 was appointed the bank’s governor, a position he held for 14 years.

Those were difficult years for Italy. Its inflation rate was formidable even by the standards of the time: 14.8% in 1979, 21.2% in 1980. That year, under Ciampi’s leadership, the bank “divorced” from the treasury, with the enthusiastic acquiescence of Beniamino Andreatta, the then treasury minister, a progressive Christian Democrat. It was thus no longer forced to buy unsold treasury bonds, the equivalent of creating money to pay the state’s debts. This was largely symbolic – inflation decreased mainly because of international factors.

By 1991 Italy was in turmoil. The Tangentopoli scandals destroyed the Italian Socialist and Christian Democratic parties, the latter of which had dominated Italian politics for decades. The Communist party, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, changed its name. In 1993 Ciampi was asked to become prime minister, unelected, to lead a government of experts to see Italy through a tumultuous period, when no party had a majority. He was the kind of person who, precisely because he had no political ambition, could be trusted by politicians who could not trust each other. He entered politics at the age of 73, the first government leader not to be a member of parliament. During his year-long tenure he started to privatise Italy’s large public sector, and abolished the automatic indexation of wages to inflation.

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In 1994 Berlusconi won the election and a new era began. But Ciampi continued to serve: in the centre-left governments of Romano Prodi and Massimo D’Alema (1996-99) he was the treasury minister and fought consistently to bring Italy into the euro, convinced that no government should be able to use devaluation to fix systemic problems. He ensured that Italy met the Maastricht criteria, thus paving the way for its entry into the single currency. This was celebrated by all shades of the political spectrum. In today’s climate critics of this operation abound, but at the time there was jubilation and Ciampi was acclaimed as a national hero, which led to his virtually uncontested election as the republic’s 10th president.

He took his role seriously, exploiting what some called his “passive charisma”. Like some other holders of the office, including Sandro Pertini (1978-85), Oscar Luigi Scalfaro (1992-99) and his successor, the former communist Giorgio Napolitano (2006-15), he rose above factionalism to promote a patriotic “love of country” in a land where the national pastime is to whinge about it. He talked about the glories of Italian history not in a jingoistic way but as if to say that the country should not be reduced to the bizarre behaviour of some of its politicians.

He was not entirely successful. In 2010, as Italy prepared to commemorate the 150th anniversary of its unification, he published a book-interview called, significantly, and melancholically, Non è il paese che sognavo (It is not the country of which I dreamed). The country of culture, of the Renaissance, the Risorgimento and the resistance, he mused, a country which even achieved membership of the euro against all the odds is also a country devoid of ideals and ethical principles, prey to secessionist temptation, to conflicts of interest, and plagued by scandals.

He is survived by Franca and his children, Claudio and Gabriella.