The sociologist, journalist and writer Francesco Alberoni died last night at the age of 93 in Milan.

Alberoni had been hospitalized for a few days at the Polyclinic, he died of a complication that arose during a therapy he was undergoing for kidney problems.

In his long career as a sociologist, academic, writer, he has investigated collective movements and mass communications, migratory phenomena and political participation.

Born in Piacenza on 31 December 1929, after graduating in Medicine in Pavia, he broadened his interests to include psychiatry and psychology, following in the footsteps of Franco Fornari and then of Father Agostino Gemelli, founder of the Catholic University, then again social and customary phenomena.

It was Falling in love and love, the essay published for the first time in 1979, immediately translated into 25 languages, in which he analyzed and recounted falling in love as the process in which two individuals rebel against their previous ties and give rise, through enthusiasm of the "nascent state", to a new community, to make it an international star.

From 1964 he was professor of Sociology at the Cattolica, but his intense university activity saw him rector of the University of Trento between 1968 and 1970, professor at the University of Catania and at the University of Milan. In 1997 he was one of the founders of the IULM in Milan and first rector until 2001. But he was also a director of Rai between 2002 and 2005 and president of the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome, from 2002 to 2012.

(Unioneonline/D)

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