Carlo De Benedetti

Origins and early life

Carlo De Benedetti was born on 14 November 1934 in Turin.

Work and career

His father, Rodolfo Debenedetti, came from a Jewish family of Piedmont, and his mother, Pierina Fumel, was French and Catholic — the Treccani encyclopedia records that the family was 'forced to leave Italy at the time of the anti-Jewish persecutions of the fascist regime', finding refuge in Switzerland in 1943; he figures in this directory by that documented Jewish father, and this entry is strictly factual. An engineer, he built his career in Turin industry, was briefly chief executive of Fiat in 1976, and in 1978 took control of Olivetti, the typewriter maker of Ivrea, which he turned in a decade into one of Europe's leading producers of personal computers and office electronics — the great industrial revival of Italy's 1980s.

From the 1980s he became one of the country's principal press proprietors, controlling the group that published the weekly L'Espresso and the daily La Repubblica, and in 2020, at eighty-five, he founded a new daily, Domani. A Swiss citizen as well as Italian, he remains, in his nineties, a voice in Italian public life.