Biography
Piero Fassino was born in Avigliana (province of Turin), in a traditional socialist family.
He graduated in Political Sciences and later registered with the Youth Communist Federation of Turin in 1968, becoming their secretary three years later.
In 1975 he was elected as Member of the City Council of the Piedmont regional capital, a position he remained in for ten years. From 1985 to 1990 he held a position as Provincial Councillor, also in Turin.
He was also secretary of the provincial Italian Communist Party (PCI) federation of Turin from 1983 to 1987, when he was elected as member of the National Secretary's Office of the party, first as the Secretary's Office Coordinator, then as Responsible of Organization, during the period where the party was transformed from the PCI into the Democratic Party of the Left (PDS).
From 1991 to 1996 he was International Secretary of the new party; his first election to the Chamber of Deputies (the first chamber of the Italian parliament) was in 1994. Re-elected in 1996, he was appointed in 1998 as Minister for Foreign Commerce in the government headed by Massimo D'Alema. From 2000, he was Minister of Justice in the Giuliano Amato government.
Candidate as vice-premier of The Olive Tree coalition in a ticket with former Rome Mayor Francesco Rutelli for the 2001 general elections in Italy won by the House of Freedoms rival coalition, he was still re-elected as a Member of Parliament.
In 2001, during the National Party Congress of the Democrats of the Left, he was elected as secretary (a position of leader in Italian political parties). He was then re-elected in February 2005, during the last party congress.
America Award of the Italy-USA Foundation in 2010.
He is married with Anna Maria Serafini who was elected in Italian Senate (the second chamber of the Italian parliament) in 2006.
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“A great biography should, like the close of a great drama, leave behind it a feeling of serenity. We collect into a small bunch the flowers, the few flowers, which brought sweetness into a life, and present it as an offering to an accomplished destiny. It is the dying refrain of a completed song, the final verse of a finished poem.”
—André Maurois (1885–1967)
“In how few words, for instance, the Greeks would have told the story of Abelard and Heloise, making but a sentence of our classical dictionary.... We moderns, on the other hand, collect only the raw materials of biography and history, “memoirs to serve for a history,” which is but materials to serve for a mythology.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)