Farewell to Clio Napolitano, widow of former president Giorgio

A bond of equals: this is how Clio Napolitano described her 64-year marriage to the former President of the Republic.

A reserved woman, she died in Rome after a long illness, almost exactly a year after her husband and two months before her 90th birthday. She and the PCI leader met in Naples, but it was in Rome that their courtship began.

“We often met at the restaurant, so much so that she told me that I had won her over because I was hungry…”, recalled the former president.

The last public photo of Giorgio and Clio Napolitano together is from January 14, 2015, the day they left the Quirinale to return home to the Monti district: a short distance, but a world of difference for Clio, a first lady who avoided the spotlight, always allergic to ceremonies and blue cars during the 9 years alongside the eleventh president.

“Well done, thank you, welcome back President,” was the welcome from the people of Via dei Serpenti. “We closed and reopened the boxes twice and that’s what counts, because there’s really no going back,” Clio Napolitano declared to Corriere della Sera.

Perhaps also because of her intolerance towards escorts, official cars and limitations (once she queued up like an ordinary citizen to visit an exhibition at the Quirinale), in 2007 she was the victim of an accident, hit by a car while crossing the pedestrian crossing in front of the Quirinale, breaking a leg and an arm.

Clio Napolitano was a lawyer for the Lega delle Cooperative until 1992, the year in which her husband was elected president of the Chamber. They met in 1959 in Rome, where she had moved from the province of Ancona to do legal practice and Napolitano was a promising young member of the PCI.

They married in a civil ceremony after a few months of engagement and settled in Naples. Daughter of two communists arrested by fascism, conceived during confinement in Ponza, Clio defended farm workers. When they saw Napolitano at some rally, the farm workers would nudge each other and say: "That's our lawyer's husband."

The couple moved to Rome in 1966, when Napolitano, a member of parliament since 1953, was called to the national leadership of the party. They returned to live in the same apartment in Monti after leaving the Quirinale. They had two sons, Giovanni and Giulio. Inseparable, they shared holidays in Val Pusteria, Stromboli and Capri.