Ossorio, voice of Southern Italy

I got to know Peppino Ossorio through my father; he spoke of him as his friend and political referent in the Neapolitan Republican Party, very close to Francesco Compagna. The latter was an example and guide for a generation of talented young Neapolitans (and others) of the time. Peppino was the first among these in the Neapolitan sphere, and he treasured Compagna's school for the rest of his life.

I only met him in person years later when I contacted him for an article I was going to write on the budget of the Campania Region. He was a regional councillor at the time and inundated me with information. Since then I have heard from Peppino constantly and each time I was fascinated by the vast amount of information I could glean from his speeches and his generosity in passing it on to me.

He was born in Ragusa, but had always lived in Naples. A chartered accountant, auditor and freelance journalist, he was elected to the Chamber of Deputies in 2006 and returned from 2012 to 2013. In 2001, he founded the European Republican Movement, an active formation until 2011. And he carried out his professional activity in Naples, where he was the owner of the 'Ossorio-Vassallo' firm of chartered accountants.

He had joined the Italian Republican Party (PRI) at a very young age, starting from the Federazione Giovanile Repubblicana, the PRI's youth organisation. He worked closely with Francesco Compagna during his years as a member of parliament in the Chamber of Deputies, as a minister of the Republic and as undersecretary to the Presidency of the Council of Ministers. He was deputy national secretary of the PRI, regional secretary of Campania and provincial secretary of Naples. But he always had a dialectical relationship with the party.

In or out of the institutions, he never left politics, strong with a good number of Republicans and former ones who would follow him anywhere and with whom he retained a strong bond forever. For him, politics was a passion, but also a way of life, so that he continued with it until the end. After politics, his other great passion was writing opinion articles. He had space for a long time in the columns of Repubblica Napoli: in his articles he always marked a line, he looked ahead. He was also assiduously involved in organising conferences and debates, which he often asked me to moderate and then report on, from which a small book could be made. He would say: 'Every debate must leave a written record. That is what Compagna would have done'.