Journalistic and academic career

Colombo was born in Châtillon, Aosta Valley, into a Jewish family. In the mid-1950s, he started working for the Italian national broadcasting corporation RAI, where he collaborated to the creation of cultural radio and television programs, documentaries and journalistic reportages. In the early 1970s, Colombo taught Theory and Techniques of Media and Radio and Television Language in the newly founded Department of Art, Music and Entertainment at the University of Bologna.^[1]

In the late 1980s, Colombo moved to New York where he worked as correspondent from the United States for La Stampa and La Repubblica, of which he has been a columnist. He wrote for The New York Times and the New York Review of Books, and taught journalism at the Columbia University and the University of California.^[2] From 1991 to 1994, he was the director of the Italian Cultural Institute in New York City.^[3]

From 2001 to 2005, Colombo was the editor-in-chief of the left-wing newspaper L'Unità. According to Marco Travaglio, Colombo left the paper after four years due to the opposition of personalities from the Democrats of the Left (DS) party against the excessive autonomy of Colombo from the party lines.^[4] From 2006 to 2022, Colombo was a columnist for Il Fatto Quotidiano,^[5] which he co-founded. Following the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Colombo said the paper had taken a pro-Russian stance, and resigned from the paper due to its hiring of Alessandro Orsini. He was also critical of the theories of Massimo Fini [it], a fellow columnist, on the German occupation of Italy during World War II.^[6][7]

Political career

Colombo has been elected to the Italian Chamber of Deputies in 1996 with the Democratic Party of the Left (PDS) and in 2008 with the Democratic Party (PD), and to the Italian Senate in 2006 with the DS. After the 2008 Italian general election, Colombo became a member of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Chamber of Deputies. From 2011, with the death of Mirko Tremaglia, till the end of the legislature in 2013, Colombo has been the oldest Deputy of the 16th Legislature. On 16 July 2007, with an article published on L'Unità, Colombo announced his candidacy for the PD secretariat, focusing on strong criticism of Silvio Berlusconi. By 1 August 2007, he gave up his candidacy, just as Antonio Di Pietro and Marco Pannella did, due to excessively bureaucratic rules in order to be able to advance his candidacy.^[8] On 2 May 2015, in occasion of Pannella's 85th birthday, Colombo joined the Transnational Radical Party (NRPTT).^[9]