Furio Colombo


Furio Colombo is an Italian journalist and politician, former editor-in-chief of L'Unità.

Biography

Journalistic and academic career

Coming from a Jewish family, Colombo was called in the mid 1950s, when he was very young, to RAI where he collaborated and directed various cultural radio and television programs, creating dozens of documentaries and journalistic services.
In the early 1970s, with the foundation of the Department of Art, Music and Entertainment, Colombo taught "Theory and Techniques of Media and Radio and Television Language" at the University of Bologna.
Colombo has been a correspondent from the United States for La Stampa and for La Repubblica, of which he has been a columnist. He wrote for the New York Times and New York Review of Books and taught Journalism at the Columbia University and at the University of California. From 1991 to 1994, Colombo directed the Italian Cultural Institute in New York City.
From 2001 to 2005, Colombo has been editor-in-chief of the left-wing newspaper L'Unità. According to Marco Travaglio, Colombo left L'Unità due to the opposition of personalities from the DS against the excessive autonomy of Colombo from the party lines.
He is currently a columnist for Il Fatto Quotidiano.

Political career

Colombo has been elected to the Chamber of Deputies in 1996 with the Democratic Party of the Left and in 2008 with the Democratic Party, and to the Senate in 2006 with the Democrats of the Left.
After the 2008 elections, Colombo became a member of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Chamber of Deputies. From 2011, with the death of Mirko Tremaglia, till the end of the legislature in 2013, Colombo has been the oldest Deputy of the 16th Legislature.
On 16 July 2007, with an article published on L'Unità, Colombo announced his candidacy for the Democratic Party secretariat, focusing on a strong criticism against Silvio Berlusconi, but on 1 August he gave up his candidacy, just as Antonio Di Pietro and Marco Pannella did, due to excessively bureaucratic rules in order to be able to advance his candidacy.
On 2 May 2015, in occasion of Marco Pannella's 85th birthday, Colombo joined the Transnational Radical Party.