During his long career as a sociologist, academic, and writer, he has explored collective movements and mass communications, migration phenomena, and political participation. But it was “In Love and Love,” an essay published for the first time in 1979 and immediately translated into 25 languages, in which he analyzed and described falling in love as a process in which two people rebel against their former ties and give birth, through the enthusiasm of a “nascent state to a new community to make him an international star. Francesco Alberoni passed away tonight at the age of 93 in Milan: he died in a polyclinic, he learned from his family, where he had been hospitalized for several days due to a complication during therapy he was undergoing for kidney problems. The date of the funeral has not yet been set.
Born in Piacenza on December 31, 1929, after receiving his medical education in Pavia, he then expanded his interests to include psychiatry and psychology, following in the footsteps of Franco Fornari and then Father Agostino Gemelli, founder of the Catholic University, then again social and habitual phenomena . From 1964 he was professor of sociology at Cattolica, but his intense university activities enabled him to become rector of the University of Trento from 1968 to 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 the first rector until 2001. But he was also director of Rai from 2002 to 2005 and president of the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome from 2002 to 2012.
His research focuses in particular on the formation and dynamics of collective movements (Movement and Institution, 1977), but Alberoni also deals with mass communication (The Powerless Elite: A Sociological Study of Fame, 1963), consumerism (Consumption and Society ( 1964), migration phenomena (“Integration of an immigrant into an industrial society”, 1967), political participation in Italy (“Party activist”, 1967). 1986), “Sex and love” (2005), “Lessons of love” (2008), the novel “Dialogues of Lovers” (2009), as well as the successes of love “Curious and a little mocking” (2010) and “The Art of Loving”.
Great erotic love that lasts (2012) until the very last love and love (2017). Among his works we should also mention Genesi (1989), Valori (1993); Optimism (1994); The Art of Leadership (2002); Leaders and Masses (2007). At the same time, he was active as a columnist for the Corriere della Sera, which from 1982 to 2011 placed on the front page every Monday one of its columns called “Public and Private”, which would later become a book for Rizzoli. In 2015, he published the anthology collection Il tradimento. “How America Betrayed Europe” and other essays, and “The Art of Having Courage” from 2016. He shares his latest research and publications with Cristina Cattaneo Beretta, writer, psychotherapist and journalist.