Carlo Caracciolo

Don Carlo Caracciolo, 9th Prince of Castagneto, 4th Duke of Melito (23 October 1925 – 15 December 2008), was an Italian publisher. He created Gruppo Editoriale L'Espresso, one of Italy's leading publishing groups, which included Italy's newspaper of record, La Repubblica. He was known as "the editor prince", a reference to his aristocratic birth and elegant manner. Early life The oldest of three children, Caracciolo was born in Florence to Filippo Caracciolo, 8th Principe di Castagneto, 3rd Duca di Melito, and American heiress Margaret Clarke. He was an older brother to Nicola Caracciolo and Marella Agnelli, the wife of Fiat S.p.A. chairman Gianni Agnelli and half-sibling of film producer Ettore Rosboch von Wolkenstein, whose daughter Bloomberg News journalist Elisabetta "Lili", Caracciolo's goddaughter, married Prince Amedeo of Belgium, Archduke of Austria-Este. Along with his brother and sister, he grew up in Rome and Turkey, and spoke Italian, French, and English. At 18, he fought in the Italian resistance movement during World War II. After the war, he attended Harvard Law School and worked for a New York law firm that had as a partner Allen Dulles, future head of the CIA. In the United States, he began to show a serious interest in publishing. Career In 1951, Caracciolo moved into publishing in Milan, and in 1955 set up the N.E.R. (Nuove Edizioni Romane) publishing house with the progressive industrialist Adriano Olivetti, manufacturer of Olivetti typewriters. In October 1955, the company founded the news magazine L'Espresso with editors Arrigo Benedetti and Eugenio Scalfari. Caracciolo was a man of the liberal left. He disdained his aristocratic title but betrayed it in his elegance of dress and manner. He believed that a modern postwar Italian republic should be run on lay rather than religious principles, and his news outlets campaigned for reform of the laws governing divorce and abortion. L'Espresso was characterized from the beginning by an aggressive investigative journalism strongly focused on corruption and clientelism by the Christian Democracy party. This made the main shareholder Olivetti unpopular with the ministries and large companies that were the primary customers of his main business.