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Italian media, including but not limited to Corriere della Serra, reported late on Friday that the former president had died in a Rome hospital.
Prime Minister Giorgio Meloni’s office expressed the Italian government’s condolences to Napolitano’s family.
Napolitano, who served as president from 2006-2015, is the only person to be re-elected to the post.
His time in office coincided with the eurozone’s sovereign debt crisis in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crash, which hit Italy particularly hard. He worked with no fewer than five different prime ministers during less than a decade as president.
His successor, Sergio Mattarella, is still in the post and is already the second-longest serving president in Italy’s modern history.
Napoli by name…
Born in Naples in 1925, Napolitano began his political career by joining the Italian Communist Party in 1945. He was first elected to Italy’s Chamber of Deputies in 1953 and remained undefeated in every re-election campaign from then until 1996.
After the dissolution of the Communist Party, Napolitano, like many others from the PCI, joined the Democratic Party of the Left.
After serving as president of the Chamber of Deputies in the early 1990s, Napolitano became Minister of the Interior under center-left Prime Minister Romano Prodi from 1996-1998. He was elected to the European Parliament as a member of the Party of European Socialists in 1999, where he served until 2004.
After his presidency he remained politically active.
jsi/msh (dpa, Reuters)
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