The Vatican responded by saying that Mr. Scalfari’s article was “the fruit of his reconstruction” and did not represent a “faithful transcription of the Holy Father’s words.”
On Thursday, a Vatican spokesman, Matteo Bruni, said the pope had learned “with sorrow of the passing of his friend” and “cherishes with affection the memory of the meetings — and the deep questions on the ultimate questions of humankind — that he had had with him over the years.”
Longtime readers said the tabloid format and combative headlines of La Repubblica, founded in 1976, introduced a new style of journalism suited to an era of change in Italian public life that loosened the hold of its traditional postwar political parties amid a welter of corruption scandals. Ezio Mauro, who succeeded Mr. Scalfari as editor in 1996, said he “revolutionized the mode of being of Italian journalism.”
La Repubblica became the country’s second-largest newspaper after Corriere della Sera — and briefly, in December 1986, the top seller. In the 1990s it vied with rivals to chronicle a series of kickback investigations known as “mani pulite” (“clean hands”), which discredited much of the postwar political elite.
In his youth, according to La Repubblica, Mr. Scalfari had shared the enthusiasms of many young people drawn to the imperial Roman mythology of Italian Fascism under Benito Mussolini. But, during World War II, he was repudiated by his fellow Fascists after writing a critical article and veered to the left.
Many years later, when extreme right-wing figures seemed to be re-emerging in the Berlusconi era, he disputed the notion that Fascism could be revived in Italy. “Fascism is unthinkable in Italy today,” he told the British newspaper The Independent in 1994. In Italy, he said, the hard right itself was “not a danger to democracy.”
Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/16/world/europe/eugenio-scalfari-dead.html
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