"I've always dreamed of being a journalist, I even wrote about it in an essay in middle school: I imagined him as an "avenger" capable of righting wrongs and injustices [...] I was convinced that that profession would lead me to discover the world". These words were written by what would later become a journalist, and also one of the most popular of the second half of the twentieth century in Italy: Enzo Biagi, born in 1920 in a village on the outskirts of Bologna and remembered as one of the best known faces of television journalism from the 60s onwards, died exactly 12 years ago, at the age of 87. His long and prestigious career has been historically linked to Rai, which he entered on October 1, 1961, becoming director of the news, of which he was also the host. He resigned in 1963 but he returned to the flagship network on several occasions over the years, until the 90s when he began hosting Il Fatto, an in-depth program after TG1 on the main events of the day, of which Biagi was the author.
It was Il Fatto himself who consecrated him as one of the most important journalists of his generation, to the point that in 2004 the successful format was proclaimed by a jury of television critics as the best journalistic program made in Rai's first fifty years. But, despite him, the success of Il Fatto was also the beginning of his decline for Biagi, given that in April 2002 the journalist – along with others – was affected by the so-called “Bulgarian edict”: the then Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, commenting on the appointment of the new Rai top management, hoped that "the new management would no longer allow the criminal use of public television". It was the beginning, for Enzo Biagi, of a long dispute between him and Rai, with numerous twists and turns and an interminable series of negotiations which first saw the shift of the time slot of Il Fatto, then its transfer to Rai 3 and finally its cancellation from the schedules. He terminated with Rai at the end of 2002, after 41 historic years of collaboration.
But the one with public television was not the only successful partnership for Biagi: after resigning as director of TG1 in 1963, he returned to Milan where he became a correspondent and collaborator of the newspapers Corriere della Sera and La Stampa. In 1967 he joined the Rizzoli group as editorial director. He signs his pieces in the weekly L'Europeo and transforms the literary periodical Novella into a gossip journal. In 1971 he was appointed director of Il Resto del Carlino with the aim of transforming it into a national newspaper. In 1974, without leaving the Corriere, he collaborated with his friend Indro Montanelli in the foundation of Il Giornale.
