Giorgio Napolitano: the life and tenderness of an “inveterate monogamist” madly in love with his Clio Bittoni

Giorgio Napolitano had no double faces: he was as helpful and kind in his public office as he was loving and subtly ironic in his married and everyday life. «I am an inveterate monogamist», the first president of the Republic in Italian history once said in 2016, interviewed by Maurizio Costanzo two years after leaving the Quirinale forever. Giorgio Napolitano, passed away on the evening of September 22nd at the age of 98, had his reasons for being able to give himself such a label given that, together with his wife Clio Bittoni, he spent 64 years of life. «We saw each other in Naples and declared ourselves in Rome. We met a lot at the restaurant, so much so that she told me I was hungry”, the former president once recalled, choosing to leave the cone of light and dedicate himself to Clio and her life once his term was over. (double) assignment.

The last public snapshot of Giorgio Napolitano and Clio Napolitano together dates back, in fact, toJanuary 14, 2015the day they came down from the hill to return home, to the Monti district: a few hundred meters which equally weighed heavily on Mrs. Clio Bittoni, first lady sui generis, always allergic to ceremonies and blue cars in the nine years she spent alongside her husband in his role as President of the Republic. True love, however, is seen above all in the hardest and most difficult moments of the individual, and that of Clio at the time of her husband’s unexpected re-election as president was one of these: «We closed and reopened the boxes twice and this is the one that counts, because there’s really no going back”, Clio Napolitano told al Corriere della Sera.

It remains that Giorgio Napolitano’s life without his wife, a woman so stubborn and intolerant of protocol that she lined up in front of the Quirinale stables like a private citizen to visit a painting exhibition, would not have been the same. Clio, now 88 years old, was a lawyer for the League of Cooperatives until 1992 – the year in which Giorgio was elected to the presidency of the Chamber. They met in 1959 in Romewhere she had moved from the province of Ancona to train in a law firm and Napolitano was a novice PCI leader. They married in a civil ceremony in Rome after a few months of engagement and went to live in Naples. She, daughter of two communists arrested during fascism, defended the rights of laborers against their employers, and didn’t think twice about following Giorgio to Rome when he was called to the national leadership of the party at the Botteghe Oscure – it was 1966 – , demonstrating that dedication and love capable of accompanying them until the end.