Indro Alessandro Raffaello Schizogene Montanelli (22 April 1909 – 22 July 2001) was an Italian journalist, historian, and writer.
Montanelli originally volunteered in the Second Italo-Ethiopian War and admired Benito Mussolini's dictatorship, but his political stance shifted in 1943. He joined the liberal resistance group Giustizia e Libertà, and in 1944, he and his wife were discovered and arrested by Nazi authorities. He was sentenced to death by firing squad but fled to Switzerland the day before his scheduled execution with the assistance of a secret service double agent.
After World War II, Montanelli continued his work at Corriere della Sera, where he started working in 1938, and distinguished himself as a liberal-conservative for many decades. As an intransigent, anticonformist, and anti-communist, he defended the idea of another political right, which was sober, cultured, pessimistic, and distrustful of mass society. In 1977, the Red Brigades terrorist group kneecapped him; however, he forgave them years later. He was also a novelist and historian, especially remembered for his Storia d'Italia (History of Italy) in volumes.
After leaving the Corriere della Sera in 1973, due to a perceived turn to the left, Montanelli worked as the editor-in-chief of Silvio Berlusconi-owned newspaper il Giornale for many years. Being opposed to Berlusconi's political ambitions, he quit as editor of il Giornale, and founded il Giornale nuovo in 1974. Berlusconi officially entered politics in 1994, after which he returned to the Corriere della Sera in 1995, and worked there until his death. Both the Italian centre-left and centre-right tried to reclaim his figure; the former, which overlooked his conservatism and anti-communism, emphasized his anti-Berlusconist militancy, while the latter, after having portrayed him as a useful idiot of the post-communist left, underplayed his opposition to Berlusconi.
Montanelli was born in Fucecchio, near Florence, on 22 April, 1909. His father, Sestilio Montanelli, was a high-school philosophy teacher and his mother, Maddalena Doddoli, was the daughter of a rich cotton merchant. The name Indro was chosen by his father after the Hindu god Indra.
Montanelli earned a law degree from the University of Florence in 1930, writing a thesis on the electoral reform of Benito Mussolini’s Fascist regime. He reportedly argued that the measure amounted not to reform, but to the abolition of elections. He later said that it was during his stay in Grenoble, while taking language lessons, that he realized journalism was his true vocation.
Montanelli began his journalistic career by writing for the fascist newspaper Il Selvaggio ("The Savage"), then directed by Mino Maccari, and in 1932 for the Universale, a magazine published once every fortnight, offering no pay. Montanelli later stated that he had viewed fascism as a movement capable of fostering an Italian national consciousness and addressing social and economic divisions between northern and southern Italy. His support began to decline in 1935, when Mussolini ordered the suppression of Universale and other publications that expressed critical views of fascism. It was in 1934 in Paris that Montanelli began writing for the crime pages of the daily newspaper Paris-Soir as a foreign correspondent in Norway, where he briefly worked as a fisherman, and later in Canada, where he ended up working on a farm in Alberta.
From there, Montanelli began a collaboration with Webb Miller of the United Press in New York. While working for the United Press, he learned to write for the lay public in a style that would distinguish him within the realm of Italian journalism. One lesson he took to heart from Miller was to "always write as if writing to a milkman from Ohio". He later recalled this open and approachable manner throughout his life. Another anecdote from Montanelli’s time in the United States concerned a class he was teaching: when a student asked him to explain an essay he had read, Montanelli replied that he would repeat it, as the student clearly had not understood it. The student then struck the table and said that, if the essay was not understandable, it was Montanelli who was at fault and should revise it. It was then that Montanelli realized that he, who had come from the authoritarian regime of Fascist Italy, had just had a confrontation with democracy.
During this time, Montanelli conducted his first interview with a celebrity, Henry Ford, who shocked him by admitting he did not have a driver's license. During the interview, surrounded by American art depicting pastoral and frontier subjects, Ford began to reverentially talk about the Founding Fathers of the United States. Looking at the décor, Montanelli asked him how he felt about having destroyed their world. Puzzled, Ford asked what he meant. Montanelli pressed on that the automobile and Ford's revolutionary assembly line system had forever transformed the country. Ford's shocked expression had caused Montanelli to realize that Ford, like most "geniuses" of the time, had not the slightest idea of what he had really done.
When Mussolini invaded Abyssinia (Ethiopia) in 1935 with the intent of making Italy an empire (Second Italo–Abyssinian War), Montanelli abandoned his collaboration with the United Press and became a voluntary conscript for this war. Aged 23, Montanelli was put in charge of a 100-strong army of local men. He later said, "It was a beautiful two years." He said he believed then that this was the chance for Italy to bring civilization to the perceived savage world of Africa. While stationed in East Africa, Montanelli entered a madamato relationship with a 12-year-old Bilen girl, a practice common among Italian soldiers in the colonies.
Montanelli began writing about the war to his father, who, without Montanelli's knowledge, sent the letters to one of the most famous journalists of those times, Ugo Ojetti, who published them regularly in the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera.
Reporter during the Spanish Civil War
On his return from Abyssinia, Montanelli became a foreign correspondent in Spain for the daily newspaper Il Messaggero, where he experienced the Spanish Civil War on the side of Francisco Franco's Nationalist troops. In this period, he shared a room with Kim Philby, who one day disappeared. Years later, Montanelli received a mysterious note from Philby saying: "Thanks for everything. Including your socks." Decades later, Philby revealed himself to the world as a Soviet mole spy.
After the capture of the city of Santander, Montanelli wrote that "it had been a long military walk with only one enemy: the heat". This judgement contrasted with the propaganda of the times that painted that battle as a bloodshed on the side of the Italian contingent. In fact, the only casualty he noted but never reported was a single death in the Alpini regiment caused by a mule kick that threw the trooper down into a dry riverbed. For this article, he was repatriated, tried, and expelled from the National Fascist Party (PNF) and from the official organization of Italian journalists. During the trial, he was asked why he had written such an unpatriotic article. He replied: "Show me a single casualty of that battle, because a battle without casualties is not a real battle!" The trial ended with an acquittal.
Journalistic activity during World War II
The stand Montanelli took against fascism led him to his first conflict with the Italian authorities. His PNF membership was revoked thereafter and Montanelli did nothing to regain this document that at the time conferred a series of privileges on its holders due to the country being dominated by Mussolini's fascist movement. To avoid the worst, the then minister of culture Giuseppe Bottai offered in 1938 to Montanelli the job of director of the Institute of Culture in Tallinn, Estonia, and lecturer in Italian at the University of Tartu, Estonia. In this period, Aldo Borelli, the then director of the Corriere della Sera, asked Montanelli to engage in a collaboration as a foreign correspondent; he could not be employed as a journalist because this had been forbidden by the fascist regime. Montanelli began to correspond for this newspaper from Estonia and Albania during the Italian annexation of these countries.