Gianni Granzotto
Gianni Granzotto (12 January 1914 – 8 March 1985) was an Italian journalist, writer and war correspondent. He led ANSA, Italy’s main news agency, from 1976 until his death in 1985. Born in Padua to a Friulian family, he grew up in Bologna and earned a degree in the arts in 1936, writing a thesis on Italo Svevo.
As a young man he started in journalism with the Gazzetta del Popolo in East Africa while serving with the student battalion Curtatone e Montanara. Back in Italy, he became director of the Bologna magazine The Assault and then spent many years at the Genoese newspaper Il Lavoro. In World War II he directed Foreign Translations for the Albanian front, experiences that would later inspire his autobiography Vojussa, mia cara.
After the war he lived in Paris as a correspondent for Time and other outlets, then worked in New York (1953–1955) as a correspondent for Italian radio. He helped develop Italy’s television news service, delivering the first foreign policy book review on TV News and, in 1960, launching the program Electoral Tribune. In 1962 he worked with the publishing house Rizzoli on a newspaper called Oggi, which was never published, and he returned to RAI, becoming CEO of Raitv and Sipra in 1965 before resigning in 1969.
Granzotto later directed The Messenger and Secolo XIX, and in 1972 he became president of the Federation of Newspaper Publishers (FIEG). In 1974 he joined Il Giornale as managing director and then chairman. He also wrote biographies such as Lepanto, Charlemagne, Hannibal, Maria Theresa and Columbus, as well as Vojussa, mia cara, published posthumously. He died in Rome in 1985 at the age of 71 from hepatitis contracted in Yugoslavia, where he had been covering the Tito–Stalin rift. In his honor, the Estense Award was created in 1985 for his contributions to journalism.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 14:48 (CET).