Alcide De Gasperi

Alcide Amedeo Francesco De Gasperi was an Italian statesman and politician who founded the Christian Democracy party. From 1945 to 1953 he was the prime minister of eight successive coalition governments. His eightyear term in office remains a landmark of political longevity for a leader in modern Italian politics. A conservative Catholic, he was one of the Founding fathers of the European Union, along with the other Italian Altiero Spinelli, the French Robert Schuman and the West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer.

De Gasperi was born in Pieve Tesino in Tyrol, which at that time belonged to AustriaHungary, now part of the Trentino in Italy. His father was a local police officer of limited financial means. From 1896 De Gasperi was active in the Social Christian movement. In 1900 he joined the Faculty of Literature and Philosophy in Vienna, where he played an important role in the inception of the Christian student movement. He was very much inspired by the Rerum novarum encyclical issued by Pope Leo XIII in 1891. In 1904 he took an active part in the student demonstrations in favour of an Italianlanguage university. Imprisoned with other protesters during the inauguration of the Italian juridical faculty in Innsbruck, he was released after twenty days. In 1905, De Gasperi obtained a degree in philology.

Source: Wikipedia