Antonio Carattoni

Antonio Carattoni was a Sammarinese politician, economist and writer who served as Captain Regent of San Marino from 1 October 2006 to 1 April 2007 alongside Roberto Giorgetti. He died in San Marino on 5 November 2026 after a long illness, three days before his eighty-first birthday.

He was born on 8 November 1945 in Sant'Agata Feltria, then in Italy, and made his career in the Republic of San Marino. For decades he belonged to the Party of Socialists and Democrats. He sat in the Grand and General Council from 1978 to 1988 and again from 1993 to 1998, and from 1983 to 1986 he held the government portfolio of Secretary of State for Industry and Handicraft. His highest institutional office came in October 2006, when he and Giorgetti were elected Captains Regent for the traditional six-month term that serves as San Marino's joint head of state.

Internationally he represented San Marino as an observer at the Council of Europe and, from 1993 to 1998, as the Grand and General Council's representative to the OECD. He also served on the boards of San Marino RTV and the Istituto di Credito Sammarinese. As an economist and independent professional he helped shape major fiscal reforms, including state accounting rules and a tax framework that brought San Marino closer to European income-verification practice.

Alongside politics he wrote on labour and financial history. His books include studies of the Sammarinese Confederation of Labour, among them Novecento, memoria e futuro, and Gli scandali finanziari nella storia del Piccolo Stato (2021), which traced crashes and frauds from the eighteenth century to recent times. An earlier volume on the Confederation had appeared in 1980.

San Marino RTV, where he had once been a board member, announced his death and offered condolences to his family, including his son Enrico Carattoni, a member of the Grand and General Council. He left a wife and two children. Italian and Sammarinese coverage remembered him as a long-serving socialist and a former head of state of the world's oldest surviving republic.

His path through San Marino's institutions spanned the years when the republic modernised its public accounts and tax rules. Colleagues in the Party of Socialists and Democrats valued his combination of ministerial experience and technical work on those reforms. Board service at the national broadcaster and the state credit institute kept him close to the country's media and finance infrastructure long after his Captain Regent semester ended.

When news of his death reached the Titano, local outlets framed him as both an ex head of state and a familiar face of late-twentieth-century socialist politics. The timing, days before his birthday, sharpened the sense of a life that had run almost exactly eighty-one years from Sant'Agata Feltria to the republic he served.