Marco Travaglio (Italian pronunciation: [ˈmarko traˈvaʎʎo]; born 13 October 1964) is an Italian journalist, writer, and pundit. Since 2015, he has been the editor-in-chief of the independent daily newspaper Il Fatto Quotidiano. Travaglio began his journalistic career in the late 1980s under Indro Montanelli at Il Giornale and La Voce, then in the 2000s worked at La Repubblica and L'Unità, before becoming one of the founders of Il Fatto Quotidiano in 2009. He is also the author of many books and a columnist for several other national newspapers and magazines, his main interests have been judicial reporting and current affairs and politics, dealing with issues ranging from the fight against the Italian Mafia to corruption.
An early critic of Silvio Berlusconi, Travaglio became one of the leading voices of anti-Berlusconism. Politically, he has described himself as a liberal, in the mold of Montanelli, and as being closer to the political right than the political left but that his criticism of Berlusconi found him asylum on the Left. He praised right-wing politicians, such as Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, and said he belongs to the liberal Right of Camillo Benso, Count of Cavour, Luigi Einaudi, Alcide De Gasperi, and Montanelli. He said he voted for those who had the best chance to remove Berlusconi from power and for anti-corruption parties, such as Italy of Values and Civil Revolution. Since the early 2010s, he has been politically close to and supportive of the Five Star Movement.
Travaglio was born in Turin, Italy, the son of a Turinese surveyor who was a train designer at Fiat Ferroviaria; his brother, Franco Travaglio, is an author, director, and librettist of modern musicals. After having obtained his classical high school diploma at the Liceo salesiano Valsalice in Turin with a score of 58/60, he graduated in modern literature with a thesis on contemporary history at the University of Turin at the age of 32, after becoming a professional journalist in 1986.
In the late 1980s, Travaglio began to pursue journalism as a career, and he started out writing for Catholic publications, such as Il nostro tempo ("Our Time"), where he met Mario Giordano. He then worked under the renowned journalist Indro Montanelli for newspapers like Il Giornale (1987–1994) and La Voce (1994–1995), and gained the attention of Montanelli himself, who once said of him that he makes use of "a more refined and not legally punishable weapon: the archives". During this period, Travaglio began to collaborate with Enzo Biagi, who hosted the television program Il Fatto. After the closure of La Voce, this activity was joined by collaboration with various newspapers and periodicals. From 1998 to 2009, Travaglio worked at La Repubblica (1998–2002) and L'Unità (2002–2009), where he hosted columns like "Bananas", "Uliwood Party", and "Zorro". Between 2006 and 2011, he was also a regular guest of the TV program AnnoZero, hosted by Michele Santoro.
During his career, Travaglio contributed as a columnist to prominent national newspapers and magazines, such as Sette, Cuore, Il Messaggero, Il Giorno, L'Indipendente, Il Borghese, La Padania, L'Espresso (hosting the "Sigornò" column after the death of Claudio Rinaldi), MicroMega, A, linus, Giudizio Universale, and La voce del ribelle. From 2008 to 2011, he edited the weekly streamed column "Passaparola" for the political commentator and future leader Beppe Grillo's blog, which was later also broadcast by Current TV. In September 2009, alongside Furio Colombo, Peter Gomez, Marco Lillo, Cinzia Monteverdi, and Antonio Padellaro, Travaglio contributed to the founding of the independent newspaper Il Fatto Quotidiano ("The Daily Fact"). He became editor-in-chief of the paper in 2015. Since 2018, he has edited a weekly column called "Balle Spaziali" on the Loft web portal of Il Fatto Quotidiano.
Political and judicial events of national importance, from Mani pulite to the troubles of controversial political figure Silvio Berlusconi, have been Travaglio's main area of interest. As a journalist, he gained public attention in 2001 after participating in a TV show on the state-owned national channel Rai 2 called Satyricon and hosted by Daniele Luttazzi. He then introduced his bestseller book L'odore dei soldi ("The Scent of Money", co-authored by Elio Veltri), which investigates the origin of Berlusconi's early fortunes. Berlusconi filed a lawsuit for slander; since the information was accurate and well documented, he was condemned to pay the legal expenses. The show, which aired during the campaign for the 2001 Italian general election, was heavily criticized by Berlusconi and his party, and labelled by them as a politically motivated, non-objective personal attack. After his victory in the general election, Berlusconi banned Luttazzi (together with Enzo Biagi and Michele Santoro, two prominent journalists who had criticized Berlusconi or investigated his history) from state-owned TV shows (the editto bulgaro), causing a long debate about freedom of information and censorship in Italy.
On 10 May 2008, Travaglio commented on Renato Schifani's election as president of the Senate of the Republic that one should "simply ask of the second highest office of the state to explain those relationships with those men who have subsequently been condemned for association with the Mafia" on the RAI current affairs talk show television program Che tempo che fa. The statement of Travaglio resulted in fierce negative reactions from Italian politicians, including from the Italian centre-left, except for Antonio Di Pietro, who said that Travaglio was "merely doing his job". Some called for chief executives at RAI to be dismissed. Grillo supported Travaglio, while Schifani announced he would go to court and sue Travaglio for slander. Schifani said Travaglio's accusation was based on "inconsistent or manipulated facts, not even worthy of generating suspicions", adding that "someone wants to undermine the dialogue between the government and the opposition". In February 2009, the German Association of Journalists assigned Travaglio its annual award for Freedom of the Press, describing him as a "brave and critical colleague ... exposing continually the attempts of Italian politicians, especially Silvio Berlusconi, to influence the media to their advantage and to negate critical reports."
Since his rise to prominence, Travaglio has been a polarizing and at times controversial figure. Of Travaglio, Grillo said in October 2007 that he wanted him as the Italian Minister of Justice. Of the oppositive view was Fausto Bertinotti, then leader of the Communist Refoundation Party, who said that Travaglio was distant from his way of thinking, methods, and polemics, including what he described as Travaglio's justicialism (giustizialismo) compared to his cultural garantismo, and in October 2005 had joked that hearing his name gave him hives. In 2005, former Italian president Francesco Cossiga described Travaglio as "a dirty, right-wing fascist", while Pier Ferdinando Casini, the then president of the Chamber of Deputies, joked in 2006 that Travaglio would become jobless if Berlusconi were to die.
Travaglio considers himself as having always been a liberal or, in his own words, "liberal-Montanellian". During his 2001 interview given to Daniele Luttazzi in the television program Satyricon, he said he was a liberal ("a pupil of Montanelli") who found asylum in the Left without identifying himself as leftist. In 2010, he confirmed such statements, saying he has ideas closer to positions that in other countries are normally represented by the Right. A Catholic, he has been described as coming from the Catholic right. In a letter sent to Il Giornale in 2007, he referred to himself as an anti-communist Catholic.
In a 2008 interview given to Claudio Sabelli Fioretti contained in the book Il rompiballe, Travaglio said: "In France I would vote with closed eyes for a Chirac, a Villepin. ... I would surely vote for Merkel. I liked very much Reagan and Thatcher." In Il rompiballe, he described Giorgia Meloni, a right-wing politician and future prime minister of Italy, as "fantastic, very good", and "committed, enthusiastic, competent", while of Roberto Maroni, a minister in Berlusconi's government, he said that he was "a decent minister". Travaglio concluded that "my Right doesn't exist. It's imaginary. It's the liberal Right. Cavour, Einaudi, De Gasperi, Montanelli. All dead."