Senator for life Giulio Andreotti died in Rome at the age of 94. The funeral will be held tomorrow afternoon in the capital, privately. No state funeral, no funeral home.
Thus disappears a symbol of the Christian Democrat power that governed Italy for the first 50 years of republican history. Andreotti covered countless public offices: he was Prime Minister seven times, Defense Minister eight times, Foreign Minister five times, State Investments Minister three times, Finance Minister twice, Budget Minister and Industry Minister, Treasury Minister once, Minister of the Interior (the youngest in Italian history), Minister of Cultural Heritage and Minister of Community Policies. He even helped write the constitution as the youngest member of the constituent assembly.
Among the shadows that have darkened Andreotti's long career, he stands out the trial for involvement in the murder of journalist Mino Pecorelli, director of the Osservatore Politico, which took place on 20 March 1979. The magistrates accused him of being the instigator of the crime. At first instance, in 1999, the Court of Assizes of Perugia acquitted Andreotti, but in 2002 the Court of Appeal overturned the sentence, condemning the former prime minister to 24 years in prison. The following year, the Cassation annulled the verdict, making the acquittal that arrived in the first instance definitive.
Andreotti was Prime Minister in the government of "national solidarity" during the kidnapping of Aldo Moro (1978-1979), with the abstention of the Communist Party. Andreotti's role in managing the Moro kidnapping is highly controversial: he refused any negotiation with the terrorists and espoused the line of firmness, unleashing strong criticism against him from the family of the kidnapped statesman. In the memoir written during his imprisonment, Moro criticizes Andreotti very harshly.
In 1993 he was accused of having favored the mafia through the mediation of his representative in Sicily, Salvo Lima. The Senate granted permission to proceed. Andreotti was tried in Palermo for criminal association: the Court acquitted him in 1999, but the appeal sentence issued in 2003 established that the former prime minister had actually "committed" the "crime of participation in the criminal association" Cosa Nostra, "concretely recognizable until the spring of 1980", however, a crime "extinguished by prescription". For the events following the spring of 1980, Andreotti was instead acquitted.
