Michelangelo Baracchi Bonvicini

Michelangelo Baracchi Bonvicini is President of Atomium - European Institute for Science, Media and Democracy launched publicly together with the former French President and Honorary President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing on the 27th of November 2009 at the European Parliament.

Baracchi Bonvicini, an English and Italian citizen, was born in London and grew up in Italy. At fifteen he left school and continued his classical studies privately. He graduated in History at the University of Bologna.

At eighteen he left for Kosovo where he reported the war in Kosovo (1999) for the Italian editorial group Quotidiano Nazionale, beginning his activity as a foreign correspondence, which brought him to stay first in Kosovo, Albania and Montenegro, then in Israel and Palestine during the second Intifada (2002) and in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran, following the US invasion of Afghanistan (2003). In 2003 he published the book Sognando Gerusalemme resulting from his stay in Israel and Palestine in 2002. After 2003 he ceased his activities as journalist, and dedicated himself to research, with special attention to European issues.

From April 2004 to December 2005 he planned an independent, supranational and non-profit organization for exchange and dissemination of research among the actors of a knowledge society. In January 2006, Atomium - European Institute for Science, Media and Democracy was formally founded.

For three years from 2006, he promoted and coordinated the start-up of Atomium - European Institute for Science, Media and Democracy that was kept confidential until the public launch on 27 November 2009, when he and Giscard d’Estaing presented Atomium - European Institute for Science, Media and Democracy to the European Parliament in Brussels, during its first annual conference.

In 2011, Baracchi Bonvicini and the former President of France Giscard d’Estaing received the medal “Plus Ratio Quam Vis” from the Polish university Jagiellonian University for “their contribution to the European academic community by founding Atomium - European Institute for Science, Media and Democracy”. The medal was first awarded in 1997 to mark the 600th anniversary of the university's re-foundation to Pope John Paul II.

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