Carlo Caracciolo

Early life The oldest of three children, Caracciolo was born in Florence to Filippo Caracciolo, 8th Principe di Castagneto, 3rd Duca di Melito, and American heiress Margaret Clarke. He was an older brother to Nicola Caracciolo and Marella Agnelli, the wife of Fiat S.p.A. chairman Gianni Agnelli and half-sibling of film producer Ettore Rosboch von Wolkenstein, whose daughter Bloomberg News journalist Elisabetta "Lili", Caracciolo's goddaughter, married Prince Amedeo of Belgium, Archduke of Austria-Este. Along with his brother and sister, he grew up in Rome and Turkey, and spoke Italian, French, and English. At 18, he fought in the Italian resistance movement during World War II. After the war, he attended Harvard Law School and worked for a New York law firm that had as a partner Allen Dulles, future head of the CIA. In the United States, he began to show a serious interest in publishing. Caracciolo was a man of the liberal left. He disdained his aristocratic title but betrayed it in his elegance of dress and manner. He believed that a modern postwar Italian republic should be run on lay rather than religious principles, and his news outlets campaigned for reform of the laws governing divorce and abortion. This made the main shareholder Olivetti unpopular with the ministries and large companies that were the primary customers of his main business. In 1956, with the magazine losing money, Olivetti made Caracciolo a present of the majority shareholding.

In June 1989, Caracciolo was awarded the Italian Order of Merit for Labour. In 1991, he and his wife Violante Visconti purchased the Torrecchia Vecchia estate, and subsequently developed its villa with architect Gae Aulenti, around which they created a notable, English-style garden to designs by Dan Pearson and others. In 2007, a year after he retired from the Espresso Group to become its honorary chairman, he bought a 33 percent share in the French newspaper Libération.

Personal life and death Caracciolo had a romantic relationship with Anna Cataldi while she’s married to steel tycoon Giorgio Falck. Caracciolo adopted their daughter Jacaranda Falck. He then married Violante Visconti di Modrone, a member of the noble Visconti di Modrone family in 1996 until her death in 2000 due to ovarian cancer. Through his marriage to Violante, he was the stepfather of film director Umberto Pasolini.

He died in 2008 at the age of 83. According to his biographer and former co-editor of L'Espresso, Nello Ajello: "He set an example for free and independent editorial content that initially seemed marginal and exclusive and instead became a major force in Italian newspaper publishing."

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