Alessandro Natta

Alessandro Natta (7 January 1918 – 23 May 2001) was an Italian politician and secretary of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) from 1984 to 1988. An illuminist, Jacobin, and communist, as he used to describe himself, Natta represented the political and cultural prototype of a PCI militant and party member for over fifty years of the Italian democratic-republican history. After joining the PCI in 1945, he was deputy from 1948 to 1992, a member of the PCI's central committee starting in 1956, was part of the direction from 1963 and of the secretariat, first from 1962 to 1970 and then from 1979 to 1983, and leader of the PCI parliamentary group from 1972 to 1979; he was also the director of Rinascita from 1970 to 1972. After 1991, he did not join the PCI's successor parties. Described as a professor, intellectual, and grey, Natta endowed oratorical ability and cultural preparation. He was known for his moral rigor, loyalty to institutions, and cultural and political knowledge; he was more a reader of the classics and Benedetto Croce than Mikhail Suslov. His leadership of the PCI was marked by his oratorical ability and a partisan pride that did not fall into factionalism. As with the other PCI leaders, his private life was separated from his public life, with no compromising photos, glitz, worldiness, and in Gian Carlo Pajetta's words, never "words like horns and lover". Early life, education, and World War II Natta was born in Oneglia, the sixth child of a family of merchants from the small bourgeoisie. His father, Antonio, was the owner of a small butcher's shop where his mother, Nannuccia, also worked. As a recent industrialised city in the early 20th century, it was bound by social inedualities that the newborn Italian Socialist Party (PSI) tried to answer; the city was a PSI stronghold, with workers, small traders, and small artisans sharing the hope for socialism. Natta's father was a socialist, and he came to share his support for egalitarianism and social justice. During his childhood, he received care from his sister Giuseppina, a teacher by profession, who played an important role in his cultural formation. He concluded his master's studies in 1935 and obtained the classical maturity in 1936. From 1936 to 1941, Natta completed his humanist studies at the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, where Carlo Azeglio Ciampi, a future president of Italy, , and Antonio Maccanico, among others, also graduated.