Alcide De Gasperi

Alcide De Gasperi was born on 3 April 1881 in Pieve Tesino, in the County of Tyrol of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a district of Italian language and culture that passed to Italy after the First World War. He studied philology at the University of Vienna and became a leading Catholic journalist and organizer among the Italian-speaking population of Trentino, editing the newspaper Il Trentino and pressing for cultural and political rights within the Habsburg state. In 1911 he was elected to the Austrian Imperial Council (Reichsrat), where he sat until the collapse of the monarchy. The experience of representing a national minority in a multinational empire shaped his later insistence on parliamentary methods, minority rights, and international cooperation.

After Trentino’s annexation to the Kingdom of Italy he entered Italian politics through the Italian People’s Party (Partito Popolare Italiano) founded by Luigi Sturzo, and was elected to the Chamber of Deputies in 1921. In 1922 he married Francesca Romani; they had four daughters. He opposed the Fascist seizure of power. After the People’s Party was suppressed he was arrested in 1927, convicted, and imprisoned; he was released in 1928 after intervention associated with the Holy See. From 1929 until the fall of Fascism he worked in the Vatican Library, remaining a lay Catholic rather than a cleric, and used those years to write on Christian democratic political thought and to prepare a return to public life.

In 1943 he was among the founders of Christian Democracy (Democrazia Cristiana). He served as Prime Minister of Italy from December 1945 to August 1953, heading eight successive governments. In that period Italy chose the Republic by referendum, signed the 1947 peace treaty, received Marshall Plan aid, joined NATO in 1949, and rebuilt parliamentary institutions against both residual Fascism and a powerful Communist Party. His coalitions at times stretched from liberals to social democrats. With Robert Schuman and Konrad Adenauer he is counted among the principal founding fathers of European integration; Italy signed the 1951 Treaty of Paris creating the European Coal and Steel Community, which he presented as a political guarantee of peace after two world wars.

He left the premiership in 1953 and died of a heart attack on 19 August 1954 at Sella di Valsugana in Trentino. He was buried in the Basilica of San Lorenzo fuori le Mura in Rome. A practising Catholic layman and statesman rather than a member of a religious order, he has been proposed for sainthood: a diocesan inquiry for beatification was opened in the 1990s and he is styled Servant of God, but he has not been beatified or canonized and has no assigned feast day or official patronages.