A quarter-century after his death, Indro Montanelli—the Italian journalist whose career spanned fascism, colonial war, Red Brigades terrorism, and the Berlusconi era—remains as divisive as he is revered. On what would be the 25th anniversary of his passing on July 22, 2001, the small Tuscan town of Fucecchio held a quiet memorial ceremony, even as the broader Italian public continues to wrestle with whether Montanelli represents journalism's highest ideals or its unexamined sins.
Why This Matters
• Journalism standards under scrutiny: Montanelli's principles of editorial independence and clear writing still shape Italian newsrooms, but his colonial past raises questions about whose voices get canonized.
• Colonial reckoning delayed: Italy has largely avoided confronting its African empire's brutality—Montanelli's case forces that conversation into the open.
• Media credibility crisis: In an age of disinformation and politicized outlets, Montanelli's famous break with Silvio Berlusconi over editorial freedom offers a template, yet his inconsistencies complicate the lesson.
A Hometown Tribute, A National Debate
At the Fucecchio municipal cemetery on what is being observed as the anniversary date, Letizia Moizzi—Montanelli's niece and president of the Fondazione Montanelli Bassi—laid flowers beside the urn containing the journalist's ashes. Mayor Emma Donnini joined her in what the foundation described as a renewal of memory for "one of the most authoritative and recognized figures in 20th-century Italian journalism."
The ceremony was modest by design. Fucecchio, a town of roughly 23,000 residents between Florence and Pisa, has long claimed Montanelli as its most illustrious son. Yet even here, the commemoration cannot escape the broader national tension: Is Montanelli a model of journalistic integrity, or a relic whose moral compromises disqualify him from veneration?
The answer depends largely on which chapter of his 92 years one chooses to emphasize.
The Colonial Chapter Italy Would Rather Forget
Montanelli's most explosive controversy involves what he himself recounted with disturbing casualness: the "madamato," a colonial practice in which Italian soldiers and officials in occupied Ethiopia took local girls—often minors—as temporary "wives." In televised interviews from 1969 and 1982, Montanelli described purchasing a 12-year-old Eritrean girl (some accounts say 14) named Destà (or Fatima, depending on the source) for 500 lire, a sum that also included a horse and a rifle. He referred to her as a "docile little animal."
The remarks, preserved on video, have become flashpoints. In 2020, amid global protests following the murder of George Floyd, activists in Milan splashed red paint on Montanelli's statue in the public gardens that bear his name, scrawling "racist" and "rapist" across the monument. Petitions to remove the statue and rename the gardens have circulated repeatedly.
Defenders argue that Montanelli's actions, while repugnant by modern standards, reflected the norms of Mussolini's African campaigns in the 1930s. Critics counter that even then, dissenting voices existed—and that "everyone did it" has never been a moral defense for sexual violence against children. The debate underscores Italy's ongoing failure to reckon with its colonial atrocities in Libya, Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Somalia, a reckoning that remains far less developed than comparable processes in France, Belgium, or Britain.
From Fascist Volunteer to Anti-Fascist Exile
Montanelli's relationship with Italian Fascism was complex and damaging to his legacy. He joined the Fascist Party, met Benito Mussolini multiple times, and volunteered for the 1935 invasion of Ethiopia, serving as a lieutenant commanding a battalion of Eritrean colonial troops (ascari). His dispatches from that war, later compiled into a book titled XX Battaglione Eritreo, glorified the campaign.
Yet by the late 1930s, his reports from the Spanish Civil War angered the regime—he refused to parrot pro-Franco propaganda—and he was expelled from the party. After the Nazi occupation of Italy in 1943, Mussolini's puppet republic sentenced Montanelli to death. Cardinal Ildefonso Schuster intervened to save him, and Montanelli fled to Switzerland, returning only after liberation.
His postwar stance on fascism was equally contentious. He dismissed militant anti-fascism as hypocritical, arguing that many of his journalist peers had themselves been fascists. He famously declared that "fascism died in Piazzale Loreto" with Mussolini's corpse in 1945, a statement critics read as an attempt to normalize the regime and avoid deeper accountability.
The Berlusconi Split: Journalism's Finest Hour?
Montanelli's most celebrated act of professional defiance came in the 1990s. After founding Il Giornale in 1974 following a break with the Corriere della Sera over its leftward drift, Montanelli ran the paper for two decades. But when his publisher, Silvio Berlusconi, entered politics in 1994, Montanelli balked.
He condemned Berlusconi's conflict of interest—a media mogul controlling both television networks and a political party—and refused to transform Il Giornale into a party mouthpiece. The rupture was bitter. Montanelli left to launch La Voce, a short-lived daily that folded after less than two years, unable to compete financially. Berlusconi, meanwhile, kept Il Giornale firmly in his orbit.
The episode is often cited as proof of Montanelli's editorial spine: he walked away from security and influence rather than compromise. Yet some observers note the irony that Montanelli had already spent years building a conservative outlet that served Berlusconi's broader political interests before the tycoon formally entered the arena.
What This Means for Today's Italian Journalism
Montanelli's professional principles remain foundational in Italian newsrooms, even as his biography grows more uncomfortable. His emphasis on clarity over jargon, reader service over ideological posturing, and factual honesty even when inconvenient are still taught in journalism schools. His insistence that reporters distinguish between news and commentary resonates in an era of opinion-saturated media.
His model of the "assault correspondent"—the journalist who goes to the scene, talks to primary sources, and writes with narrative flair—has influenced generations of Italian investigative reporters. Modern practitioners cite Montanelli's Venetian lagoon pollution series as an early template for long-form investigative work that identified systemic causes behind visible crises.
Yet his legacy is shadowed by what he refused to confront. The madamato admission, the fascist enthusiasms, the dismissive attitude toward anti-fascist resistance—all suggest a journalist whose celebrated independence coexisted with profound moral blind spots, particularly concerning race and imperial violence.
The Red Brigades and the Price of Visibility
On June 2, 1977, four gunmen from the Red Brigades shot Montanelli in the legs outside his Milan apartment. The gambizzazione (kneecapping) was intended to punish him as a symbol of the bourgeois press. Montanelli survived and continued working, and the attack became a defining moment in the Years of Lead, Italy's decade of far-left and far-right terrorism.
The incident burnished Montanelli's reputation for courage under fire—both literal and figurative. It also underscored the dangers faced by high-profile Italian journalists during that period, a risk environment that has largely receded but never entirely disappeared.
A Legacy Without Consensus
At 92, Montanelli died in Milan on July 22, 2001. He had famously said on his 80th birthday: "My professional life is my life, tout court." For a man whose entire identity was inseparable from his byline, the statement was both accurate and limiting. It left little room for introspection about the human costs embedded in that professional life—the Ethiopian child bride, the colonial violence he participated in and later romanticized, the historical narratives he bent to suit his ideological preferences.
Today, Italy has yet to reach consensus on how to remember him. The Fondazione Montanelli Bassi preserves his archive and promotes his journalistic ideals. The gardens in Milan still carry his name, though the statue is now a recurring target for protesters. Journalism students study his prose, while historians dissect his contradictions.
What remains undeniable is that Montanelli's career—spanning seven decades, wars on three continents, terrorism, political upheaval, and media revolution—encapsulates both the nobility and the compromises of Italian journalism in the 20th century. Whether that makes him a hero, a cautionary tale, or both depends on which principles one prioritizes: the editorial courage he displayed at his best, or the moral reckonings he evaded until the end.
