Alessandro Leogrande (20 May 1977 – 26 November 2017) was an Italian journalist.
Born in
Taranto
Taranto (; ; previously called Tarent in English) is a coastal city in Apulia, Southern Italy. It is the capital of the province of Taranto, serving as an important commercial port as well as the main Italian naval base.
Founded by Spartans ...
in 1977, he moved to Rome in 1996, where he graduated with a degree in philosophy from
Sapienza University of Rome
The Sapienza University of Rome (), formally the Università degli Studi di Roma "La Sapienza", abbreviated simply as Sapienza ('Wisdom'), is a Public university, public research university located in Rome, Italy. It was founded in 1303 and is ...
. During his career, Leogrande wrote for newspapers and magazines such as ''Internazionale'', ''
l'Unità
(; English: "the Unity") is an Italian newspaper, founded as the official newspaper of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) in 1924. It was supportive of that party's successor parties, the Democratic Party of the Left, Democrats of the Left, a ...
'', ''
il Manifesto
(; English: "the manifesto") is an Italian daily newspaper published in Rome, Italy. While calling itself " communist" and broadly left-wing, it is not connected to any political party
A political party is an organization that coordin ...
'', ''
Panorama
A panorama (formed from Greek language, Greek πᾶν "all" + ὅραμα "view") is any Obtuse angle, wide-angle view or representation of a physical space, whether in painting, drawing, photography (panoramic photography), film, seismic image ...
'', ''
il Riformista
''Il Riformista'' (English: "The Reformist") is an Italian political and financial newspaper based in Rome, Italy.
History and profile
Launched on 23 October 2002, ''Il Riformista'' was formed of about four pages with orange as main colour used ...
'', ''il Fatto Quotidiano'', ''Una Città'', ''Nuovi Argomenti'', and ''gli Asini''. He was a regular columnist for Corriere del Mezzogiorno, editor of ''Fuoribordo'', insert of the weekly ''Pagina 99'' and hosted broadcasts for Rai Radio 3 and Radio Svizzera Italiana. For ten years, he was deputy editor of the monthly ''Lo straniero''.
He made his debut in long form journalism with ''Un Mare Nascosto'' (A Hidden Sea 1999), dedicated to his hometown, and in later books he went on investigating the new mafias, protest movements, and the exploitation of foreign agricultural laborers in Southern Italy. He then explored the topic of migration from Africa and the Balkans in his books ''Il naufragio. Morte nel Mediterraneo'' (Death in the Mediterranean 2011), ''Adriatico'' (Adriatic 2011), ''La frontiera'' (The border 2015), and wrote the libretto of two operas: Katër i Radës (2014) on the Tragedy of Otranto, and Haye, Le parole, la notte (2017), a musical voyage in contemporary migrations.
In 2017 Leogrande travelled to Argentine to carry out research for a new book on the relationship between military chaplains and the army during the dictatorship of 1973–83.
Leogrande died in Rome at the age of 40 from a heart attack. In speaking of his son, his father Stefano remembered his work "in defense of the downtrodden and the most fiercely exploited in all sort of settings where abuses were committed, from agricultural labourers to migrants to Argentinian desaparecidos." In 2018 a street was entitled to him in the capital of Albania, Tirana.
A Tirana nasce via Alessandro Leogrande
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References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Leogrande, Alessandro
1977 births
2017 deaths
21st-century Italian journalists
Italian male journalists
Sapienza University of Rome alumni
People from Taranto