Federico Rampini


Federico Rampini is an Italian journalist, writer, and lecturer who holds both Italian and American citizenship. He served as deputy editor of Il Sole 24 Ore, and has worked as chief foreign correspondent for La Repubblica since 1997. He has been residing in the United States since 2000. He is the 2019 receipient of the Ernest Hemmingway Prize.

Early life, education and family

Rampini was born in Genoa, Italy on March 25, 1956, and was raised in Brussels due to his father's work at the European Commission. He attended the European School, Brussels I, where he earned a European Baccalaureate. He then attended Bocconi University in Milan, where he spent four years studying political economy. Subsequently, he attended the Sapienza University of Rome, where his contemporaries included, amongst others, Mario Draghi. He would also attend seminars of the French liberal sociologist Raymond Aron at the École pratique des hautes études in Paris. He was a member of the Italian Communist Party from 1974 to 1984.
Rampini is married to Stefania, with whom he has two children, actor Jacopo Rampini and Costanza Rampini a university professor. He has lived in the United States since 2000, and became a US citizen in 2014.

Career

Rampini’s activity as a journalist began in 1977 in "Città futura", a weekly magazine of the Italian Communist Youth Federation whose secretary at the time was Massimo D’Alema. From 1979 to 1982 he worked as the economic-union editor for the PCI weekly Rinascita. In 1982 Rampini moved to Mondo Economico then to L'Espresso . Rampini worked for Il Sole 24 Ore as correspondent from France for five years and later as deputy director. Since 1995 he has been working for La Repubblica, first at the head of the Milanese editorial staff, then as foreign correspondent from Brussels, San Francisco, Beijing, and since 2009 from New York. Rampini often reports on top-level international summits such as the G-8,G-20, and the World Economic Forum in Davos; he also reports from the White House as he holds press accreditation from the Presidency of the United States of America.
Rampini, who is a prolific non-fiction writer and essayist, has written over 30 books, most of which are published by Mondadori and have been translated into several languages. In 2005, his book Il Secolo Cinese -"The Chinese Century", topped the Italian bestseller charts in non-fiction for several months and is now in its sixteenth edition. His 2006 book L'Impero di Cindia - "The Chindia Empire: China, India and Their Surroundings", sold over 100,000 copies.
Rampini was named among the fifty most influential personalities in Europe in 2005 by the European Voice poll EV50. He has been a visiting professor at the University of California Berkeley School of Journalism, Bocconi University in Milan, and at the Shanghai University of Economics and Finance.
Rampini was accused in early 2015, among others by translator Marion Sarah Tuggey, of having based one of his articles on translations and reductions of articles and reports from newspapers such as the New York Times and the Financial Times. Among these, an interview with Vandana Shiva, which would have been produced through partial translation and readjustment of a blog post on Shiva's website.
To illustrate such cases of plagiarism, Tuggey and others used the hashtag #rampinomics.

Awards

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