Andrea Purgatori

Andrea Purgatori (1 February 1953 – 19 July 2023) was an Italian journalist, writer, screenwriter, television presenter and occasional actor.

Life and career Born in Rome, in 1974 Purgatori started his career as a journalist, and in 1976 he began a long collaboration with the newspaper Corriere della Sera, in which he served as an investigative journalist and a war correspondent. He later collaborated with other publications, including Le Monde diplomatique, The Huffington Post, Vanity Fair and L'Unità.

As a screenwriter Purgatori's credits include several Marco Risi's films, notably The Rubber Wall (1991), based on his own investigation about the Ustica affair, and Fort Apache Napoli (2010), about the murder of journalist Giancarlo Siani, as well as films by Giuliano Montaldo, Michele Placido, Carlo Verdone, Alessandro Di Robilant. In 2001, he received the prize "Archivio Disarmo - Golden Doves for Peace" from IRIAD.

From 2017, Purgatori wrote and hosted the program Atlantide on La7; in 2019, the program was awarded the Flaiano Prize for best cultural television show. He was also an essayist, and in 2019 he made his debut as a novelist with Quattro piccole ostriche.

An environmental activist, Purgatori served as president of the Italian branch of Greenpeace from 2014 to 2020. He died in Rome, on 19 July 2023, at the age of 70. Purgatori was the father of the actor Edoardo Purgatori and was a fan of the Serie A club A.S. Roma.

He considered himself a "dubious believer".

Death Purgatori died at the age of 70 on 19 July 2023, two months after being diagnosed with a serious form of brain cancer. The day after his death, to ascertain the appropriateness of the treatment the journalist had been subjected to, his family filed a complaint with the Rome Public Prosecutor's Office, which opened an investigation for culpable homicide against the doctors. The post-mortem carried out the following September confirmed the absence of metastases in the brain at the time of death. and an expert report ordered by the prosecutor's office in April 2024 traced the causes of death back to unrecognized infective endocarditis, for which antibiotics would have sufficed instead of the radiotherapy he was subjected to. In March 2025, a request was made to send four doctors — a cardiologist, a radiologist, and two of his assistants — to trial on charges of manslaughter.

Filmography

Screenwriting credits

Acting roles