Barbara Spinelli

Barbara Spinelli was born in Rome on 31 May 1946. Her father, Altiero Spinelli, had spent years in Fascist prisons and internal exile and, while confined on the island of Ventotene, wrote the 1941 Manifesto of Ventotene with Ernesto Rossi, with contributions from Eugenio Colorni. He went on to help found the European Federalist Movement and is regarded as one of the founding fathers of the European Union. Her mother, Ursula Hirschmann, was a German Jewish anti-fascist and federalist, and the sister of the economist Albert O. Hirschman. Ursula had been married to Eugenio Colorni, who was killed by Fascists in Rome in 1944, and had three daughters with him: Silvia, Renata, later a well known editor and translator, and Eva, an economist who married Amartya Sen. Barbara was the second of the three daughters Ursula had with Altiero, alongside Diana and Sara. She grew up in a household at the centre of the postwar European federalist movement, roots that remained a reference point throughout her life.

Before becoming a journalist, Spinelli spent three years as a researcher at the Istituto Affari Internazionali (Institute of International Affairs) in Rome, working on Yugoslavia and Eastern Europe. That research led to her first book, Presente e imperfetto della Germania orientale, published in 1972 by the institute with Il Mulino. In October 2008 the Faculty of Political Science of the University of Eastern Piedmont awarded her an honorary master's degree in European Studies.

Spinelli began her career in 1972 at the Roman daily Il Globo and became a registered professional journalist in 1974. Between 1973 and 1976 she was the Brussels correspondent of Il Globo and of the weekly L'Espresso. In 1976 she was one of the co-founders of la Repubblica, which she later served as Paris correspondent, and where she worked alongside the columnist Mario Pirani, an important figure in her private life.

From the first half of the 1980s she was a special correspondent in Paris for the Corriere della Sera, then correspondent and later columnist for La Stampa of Turin. She lived in Paris for many years and became known as an expert on East West relations and international politics. In 2010 she returned to la Repubblica as a columnist, writing for it until mid 2014. From 2016 she was a regular contributor to Il Fatto Quotidiano, where she wrote mainly about international affairs for about a decade. Her last article for the paper, on the conflict between the United States and Iran, appeared on 10 March 2026.

In March 2013 Spinelli was among those who launched a petition, supported by the left wing magazine MicroMega, asking the Italian Parliament to apply law 361 of 1957 to Silvio Berlusconi, on the grounds of conflict of interest. For the 2014 European elections she was one of the founders and chief promoters of L'Altra Europa con Tsipras, a single list of the Italian left backing Alexis Tsipras for President of the European Commission. She headed the list in three constituencies and, although she had said she would give up any seat, she came first in preferences in both Central Italy (36,759) and Southern Italy (27,955). On 7 June 2014, after pressure from Tsipras and heated arguments within the coalition, she accepted the seat for Central Italy.

She served in the European Parliament from 1 July 2014 to 2 July 2019. She was vice chair of the Committee on Constitutional Affairs and a member of the Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs, and sat on delegations to the EU Russia Parliamentary Cooperation Committee, for relations with Israel, and to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Union for the Mediterranean. She worked extensively on migration and asylum. On 11 May 2015 she left L'Altra Europa, describing it as a failed project, and served the rest of her term as an independent in the European United Left/Nordic Green Left group. She was also a member of the advisory panel of DiEM25.

For many years Spinelli was the partner of the economist Tommaso Padoa-Schioppa, a former member of the European Central Bank's executive board, one of the architects of the euro and Italian minister of economy and finance from 2006 to 2008, until his death in December 2010. Earlier, at la Repubblica, she had a long relationship with her colleague Mario Pirani. She lived for long periods in Brussels and Paris before returning to Rome. Her uncle was the economist Albert O. Hirschman and her half sisters included the translator Renata Colorni.

Spinelli's journalism and politics were rooted in anti-fascism, pacifism and the federalist idea of Europe inherited from her parents. She was a sharp critic of what she saw as Europe's failure to learn from its past, the theme of Il sonno della memoria, and argued in Ricordati che eri straniero that Europe should accept the stranger as other than itself without seeing him as an inevitable threat. In Parliament and in print she defended the rights of refugees and migrants and criticised EU border policy. In later years she wrote critically about NATO, the war in Ukraine, the war in Gaza and United States foreign policy. In March 2025, when Giorgia Meloni quoted passages of the Manifesto of Ventotene in Parliament to attack it, Spinelli replied that the prime minister had taken lines out of context and ignored the democratic and social vision of its authors.

Spinelli was part of the founding generation of la Repubblica and one of the few Italian journalists to have been a correspondent, columnist and author across the country's three leading newspapers. The Corriere della Sera described her as one of the most recognisable voices of the Italian left, and her death was seen as a farewell to a cultural world closely tied to the great political experiences of the second half of the twentieth century. Her essays on memory, totalitarianism and hospitality, and her role as the daughter and interpreter of Altiero Spinelli and Ursula Hirschmann, kept the Ventotene tradition alive in Italian public debate.

Special prize of the Viareggio Prize, 2002, for Il sonno della memoria. E giornalismo prize for 2004, presented on 8 March 2005, for her defence of civil rights. Grande Ufficiale of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic, conferred on 6 April 2005 on the initiative of President Carlo Azeglio Ciampi. Ischia International Journalism Prize, journalist of the year for print, 2006. Ignazio Silone International Prize for essays, 2007. Honorary master's degree in European Studies from the University of Eastern Piedmont, 21 October 2008.

Presente e imperfetto della Germania orientale (Istituto Affari Internazionali and Il Mulino, 1972). Il sonno della memoria. L'Europa dei totalitarismi (Mondadori, 2001). Introduction to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Arcipelago Gulag (Mondadori, 2001). Ricordati che eri straniero (Qiqajon, Comunita di Bose, 2005). Una parola ha detto Dio, due ne ho udite. Lo splendore delle verita (Laterza, 2009). Moby Dick, o L'ossessione del male (Morcelliana, 2010). Il soffio del mite. Beati i miti (Qiqajon, 2012). Dalle Penultime cose alle Ultime, in Ivano Dionigi (ed.), Eredi. Ripensare i padri (BUR Rizzoli, 2012). La sovranita assente (Einaudi).

Her decision in June 2014 to take up a seat in the European Parliament, after saying during the campaign that she would renounce it, split L'Altra Europa con Tsipras. Her acceptance of the Central Italy seat left out Marco Furfaro of Sinistra Ecologia Liberta and allowed Eleonora Forenza of Rifondazione Comunista to be elected in the South, and some activists and party officials attacked her publicly. Marco Travaglio defended her in Il Fatto Quotidiano, noting the scale of her personal vote. Less than a year later she left the list herself.

Barbara Spinelli died in Rome on 7 October 2026, aged 80. The news was announced by her family and first reported by Il Fatto Quotidiano, and was confirmed by European Parliament sources in Strasbourg. In their statement the family thanked Professor Cortesi, his staff and all the personnel of the Villa del Rosario clinic for their loving care and great seriousness, and thanked everyone who had loved and esteemed her. The funeral was to be held in strictly private form. The cause of death was not made public.