Giorgio Napolitano - Early Life

Early Life

Giorgio Napolitano was born in Naples. In 1942 he matriculated at the University of Naples Federico II. He adhered to the local University Fascist Youth ("Gioventù Universitaria Fascista"), where he met his core group of friends, who shared his membership in the Italian fascism. As he would later state, the group "was in fact a true breeding ground of anti-fascist intellectual energies, disguised and to a certain extent tolerated".

A theatre enthusiast since high school, during his university years he contributed a theatrical review to the IX Maggio weekly magazine, and had small parts in plays organised by the Gioventù Universitaria Fascista itself. He played in a comedy by Salvatore Di Giacomo at Teatro Mercadante in Naples. Napolitano dreamed of being an actor and spent his early years performing in several productions at the Teatro Mercadante. He later measured himself against Joyce and Eliot.

Napolitano has often been cited as the author of a collection of sonnets in Neapolitan language, published under the pseudonym Tommaso Pignatelli, entitled "Pe cupià ’o chiarfo" ("To mimic the downpour"). He denied this in 1997 and, again, on the occasion of his presidential election, when his staff described the attribution of authorship to Napolitano as a "journalistic myth". However, he published his first book called "Movimento Operaio e Industria di Stato", which can be translated to "Workers' Movement and State Industry" in 1962.