Massimo Cacciari

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Massimo Cacciari (June 5, 1944) is an Italian philosopher and politician, currently mayor of Venice, Italy.

[edit] Life

Born in Venice, he graduated in philosophy at the University of Padua (1967), and, since, 1985 he was professor of Aesthetics at the Architecture Institute of Venice. He founded several philosophical reviews and published essays centred on the "negative thought" inspired by authors like Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger and Ludwig Wittgenstein.

After a brief affiliation with Potere Operaio, Cacciari adhered to the Italian Communist Party (PCI), holding positions which seemed to have little connection to his philosophical interests: in the 1970s he was responsibile of industrial politics for the PCI Veneto section and, elected to the Italian Chamber of Deputies in 1976-1983, he was a member of the Parliamentary commission for industry.

After the death of Enrico Berlinguer (1984), he left the party and switched to more moderate positions, although he never left the Centre-Left coalition. In 1993 he was elected mayor of Venice, a position he held until 2000. Cacciari was also proposed as future national leader of the coalition, later named Olive Tree, but his defeat at the 2000 election as governor of the Veneto region made this occasion wane. In 2005 he was again elected mayor of Venice, winning the center-left primaries against former magistrate Felice Casson.