Leonilde Iotti

Nilde Iotti

Leonilde "Nilde" Iotti (born April 10, 1920 in Reggio nell'Emilia , Italy , † December 3, 1999 in Rome ) was an Italian politician . After the Second World War she was a member of the Constituent Assembly and from 1948 until her death in the Italian Chamber of Deputies (13 legislative terms ), of which she was President from 1979 to 1992.

biography

Nilde Iotti was the daughter of a railroad worker and socialist trade unionist. She studied literature at the Catholic University of Milan , where the future Prime Minister Amintore Fanfani was one of her lecturers. After graduating in 1942, she worked as a teacher and joined the women's organization of the Fascist Party (PNF). After the fall of Mussolini and the armistice with the Allies , Iotti approached the Communists, who were still operating in secret, and became active in the anti-fascist resistance ( Resistancea ) . After the end of the war, she became chairwoman of the Unione donne italiane (UDI) in the Emilia-Romagna region, which emerged from the Resistance women groups .

Iotti was elected to the Assemblea Costituente , the constituent assembly of the Italian Republic, in 1946 as a candidate for the Communist Party of Italy (Partito Comunista Italiano, PCI) . In the assembly she belonged to the so-called "Committee of 75", which was responsible for drawing up the draft constitution . Iotti was thus one of the mothers of the republican constitution. In 1948 she moved into the Chamber of Deputies for the first time , to which she belonged until her death in 1999. From 1979 to 1992 she was President of the Chamber of Deputies and thus the first woman in the third highest state office (after the President of the State and the President of the Senate).

In 1979 she became a member of the European Parliament and was a member of it until the end of the first electoral term in 1984.

Iotti was a close collaborator and - from 1946 until his death in 1964 - the partner of Palmiro Togliatti , the long-time Secretary General of the PCI (although he was married to Rita Montagnana ). Iotti was a member of the PCI Central Committee . In 1991 she participated in the party's majority turning away from communism and then belonged to the Partito Democratico della Sinistra (Democratic Left Party).

Twenty years after her death, the Chamber of Deputies library was named after Nilde Iotti. At the time, she ordered the library to be opened to the general public and relocated to a renovated building complex in Via del Seminario . There, together with the Senate Library named after Giovanni Spadolini , it forms the so-called Polo bibliotecario parlamentare and is thus part of one of the world's largest parliamentary libraries .

Web links

Commons : Nilde Iotti  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Entry in the history portal of the Chamber of Deputies
• Entry on Leonilde Iotti in the European Parliament 's database of deputies
• rulers.org