Luciana Castellina

Luciana Castellina was born in Rome on 9 August 1929. She graduated in law from Sapienza University of Rome.

In 1947, she joined the Italian Communist Party. Castellina started her career in journalism in the 1950s, working for the daily newspaper Paese Sera. She later worked for several other newspapers, including L'Unità, Il Manifesto, and Liberazione. Her writings focused on issues such as workers' rights, feminism, and communism. In 1974, she was co-founder of the Proletarian Unity Party for Communism. She served four terms in the Italian Chamber of Deputies and twenty years in the European Parliament. In the European parliament, she served as chair of the Committee on Culture, Youth, Education and the Media and of the Committee on External Economic Relations.[3][4][5]

She was president of Italia cinema, an agency to promote Italian films abroad, from 1998 to 2003.[3]

She served as editor of Nuova Generazione, a Communist youth magazine, and of Liberazione, and also played an important role at Il Manifesto.[5][2]

Castellina was named an Officier in the French Ordre des Arts et des Lettres and a Comendadora (Commander) of the Republic of Argentina.[3]

With the 2015 presidential elections, Left Ecology Freedom supported Castellina's name as possible successor of Giorgio Napolitano as President of Italy. She has been supported for the first three ballots, until the party decided to support for the fourth ballot Sergio Mattarella who was later elected president.[6]

She has been married to communist leader Alfredo Reichlin. They had two children, Lucrezia and Pietro, both of them economists.

• Cinquant'anni d'Europa (2007)
• Eurollywood, Il difficile ingresso della cultura nella costruzione dell'Europa (2008)
• La scoperta del mondo, a finalist for the Strega Prize
• Siberiana, won the Letterario Vallombrosa Prize in 2012
• Guardati dalla mia fame (2014) with Milena Agus
• Manuale antiretorico dell'Unione Europea (2016)