Journalist Antonio Villoresi has passed away

He died yesterday in Florence after a long illness, the journalist, for years a reporter for La Nazione, Antonio Villoresi protagonist of the most important facts of Florentine news in the 1970s and 1980s.

Born in Florence in 1944, a professional journalist since 1974, he began his work at Giornale del Mattino and Nazione Sera. He joined the Florence daily La Nazione after a short time, first as a correspondent from Sesto Fiorentino, his birthplace and place of growth to which he has always remained attached, and then in the newsroom, wanted by the chief reporter Elvio Bertucelli, marking an era in Florentine journalism.

He was a crime and judicial reporter as a protagonist of the big events; from the murders, to the events of the monster, to the years of terrorism and the massacres of the 1970s/80s. He then also moved on to the Interior and Foreign editors. In the early 1990s he is at the pages of Economy.

He has collaborated as an expert with the Quotidiano Nazionale for the Agriculture pages and has written books on wine and Florence including "Wine in Florence" and "Florence the Kitchen in Your Pocket" also translated into English. Among the first, if not the first, in Tuscany to write about wine in the pages of a daily newspaper, he held columns that were already groundbreaking.

A lifelong lover of medieval history and Latin, he has organized as a creator and promoter, several meetings among international scholars on themes linking "the Middle Ages" to contemporary Europe. In 2000 on the occasion of the seven hundredth anniversary of the Divine Comedy, he called actors, singers and cultural figures to read the cantos of Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso in Piazza Signoria, an event reported by the international press.

He was a correspondent for Il Tempo in Rome and deputy correspondent to colleague Pierandrea Vanni for Montanelli's Il Giornale. After retiring, he served on the National Order of Journalists' professional journalist exam board in Rome.

A true chronicler, always looking at the facts, who faced the evolution of the disease with awareness and a strength that came from his deep humanity and profound love for life.m

He leaves in addition to his wife Annamaria his two daughters, Laura and Simona, and two grandchildren, to whom we offer heartfelt condolences. The funeral will be held today, Oct. 3, at 4 p.m. at the basilica of San Miniato a Monte by Father Bernardo.