L'Europeo

Claudia Cardinale on the cover of L'Europeo, February 1960
Categories	Newsmagazine
Frequency	Weekly
Year founded	1945
Final issue	1995, 2013
Company	Rizzoli
Country	Italy
Language	Italian

L'Europeo was a prominent Italian weekly news magazine launched on 4 November 1945, by the founder-editors Gianni Mazzocchi and Arrigo Benedetti.Camilla Cederna was also among the founders. The magazine stopped publication in 1995. The title returned to the news-stands in 2001 and 2002 as a quarterly, then as a bi-monthly from 2003 to 2007 and a monthly from 2008, until closure in 2013.

L'Europeo is described as independent, secular-oriented and liberal, and the most authoritative in its genre. It combined news, politics, arts, true crime stories and the world of entertainment. The magazine was established in 1945 and had its heyday in the mid-1940s, 1950s and 1960s. Starting with a circulation of 20,000 it sold 300,000 copies already in 1947.

The magazine paid special attention to photographic image and documentary photography in the tradition of Life magazine in the United States. According to Benedetti: "People look at articles, but read the photos" (Gli articoli si guardano, le fotografie si leggono).

Directed mainly at a middle-class and family readership it was slightly more culturally elevated than its popular rival, Epoca. Its political orientation was centrist, but it was also one of the few magazines during the Cold War willing to openly have dialogue with the Italian Communist Party.

L'Europeo had a circulation of 127,422 copies in 1984.

Focussing on news and current affairs, the magazine achieved some impressive scoops, one of the most memorable being Tommaso Besozzi's investigative report in July 1950 on the mysterious death of the Sicilian bandit Salvatore Giuliano, which convincingly disproved official accounts of how the bandit had died. The now famous headline of the article read: "The only thing certain is that he is dead."

In March 1954 the magazine denounced the U.S. ambassador in Rome, Clare Boothe Luce, of intrusion into Italian internal politics in a speech she made in January at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington. She had mentioned electoral fraud perpetrated by the left at the June 1953 elections, advising the government on how to fight the communists. After the denial of Mrs. Luce, a dispute broke out among various journalists including Nicola Adelfi, author of the first scoop, the famous Indro Montanelli, and Benedetti himself.