It is with great sadness that API learned of the death on 20 June of Ugo Piccione, former president of API-IPA and a well known Brussels correspondent from the sixties well into the eighties.
Ugo Piccione was born in Palermo in 1928. In the late sixties he came to Brussels for the first time as a foreign correspondent for the Italian financial newspaper Il Sole 24 Ore. In 1975 he became one of the first members of API. In 1979 he became the second president of our association, as successor of Henri Schavoir. In 1983 he left Belgium, only toi return again in 1986 as correspondent for ‘La Repubblica’.
Piccione was a highly respected European journalist. He was considered as one of the most important Italian correspondents in Brussels at that time, alongside other eminent colleagues from across the Alps, such as Emmanuele Gazzo, Ferdinando Riccardi, Francesco Mattioli, Antonio Foresi, Franco Papitto and Giampiero Gramaglia.
Ugo Piccione was a convinced European with an enormous knowledge of the European project, with nearly always a smile on his face. Arturo Spinelli, one of the founding fathers of the EU, and later member of the European Commission and the European Parliament, once called him “one of the best economic journalists in the area of the European Commission”. Ugo Piccione also wrote an authoritative book on the influence of the US and Japan on the European economy.
Marc Paoloni, who in 1983 succeeded Ugo Piccione as API-president, now writes:
“Ugo Piccione will remain in our memory as a prominent figure in Italian and European journalism for his pen, rigor and depth. For all who have known him, the memory of Ugo will be that of a man of great human warmth and an immense sense of friendship; behind his great reserve, which might have made him appear distant, behind his large blue eyes, which hid a more mischievous than intimidating personality, Ugo was animated by great intelligence, lively and curious. He was a character who left no one indifferent and forged strong ties among his colleagues and acquaintances, despite or rather due to an intransigence on everything he rigorously applied to himself in his work as in his daily life. We think of Elsa and Patrick to whom he had immense affection and offer them all our friendliest condolences.”
Ugo Piccione recently lived in Montpellier, France, where he died on June 20th.
