Adriano Ossicini

Adriano Ossicini (born 20 June 1920) is an Italian partisan, politician, psychiatrist, academic, and Minister for Family and Social Solidarity in the Dini Cabinet.

Biography Ossicini was born in Rome on June 20, 1920.

During the Fascist regime Ossicini's father, Cesare, was a lawyer and one of the founders of the Italian People's Party.

In April 1938, at a FUCI Catholic students' conference held in Orvieto, Ossicini voiced his opposition to fascism. Once he returned to Rome, he was interrogated by the fascist police, who opened a file on him. In October of the same year, at a new conference of FUCI in Genoa, he appealed to Italian Catholics to oppose racism and fascism, accusing the regime of connivance with nazism. Despite being violently beaten for a few days, he only admitted that he had expressed criticism of racial discrimination under fascism as racism ran counter to Christian Doctrine. On this occasion, from the fascist police, he heard the term "cattocomunista" or Catho-Communist for the first time, a derogatory term for left-wing Catholics. During World War II, Ossicini became one of the founders of the Party of the Christian Left, close to the Italian Communist Party; the party was dissolved in 1945 after the Vatican's newspaper L'Osservatore Romano announced that only Christian Democracy was entitled to represent Christians in politics.

After World War II Ossicini graduated in medicine at the end of 1944 and was admitted as a volunteer assistant at the Fatebenefratelli Hospital. He enrolled in a specialization course in Psychiatry, dealing with nervous and mental diseases; in 1947 he became a university professor of psychology at the Sapienza University of Rome.

In 1968, Ossicini returned to politics and was elected to the Italian Senate as an independent candidate in the list of the PCI. In the Senate he was a member of the group of the Independent Left closely linked to the Communist Party; Ossicini held his seat at Palazzo Madama uninterruptedly from 1968 to 1992. He was also vice-president of the Senate from 1979 to 1983 and from 1985 to 1987.

In 1995 he became Minister for Family and Social Solidarity of the Dini Cabinet, formed after the fall of the first Berlusconi I Cabinet. He joined Lamberto Dini's Italian Renewal party and was elected for the last time to the Senate in 1996.