Nicolò Carandini

Count Nicolò Carandini (December 6, 1896 – March 18, 1972) was the first Italian ambassador to Britain after World War II.

Carandini was born in Como.

His political career started in the 1920s when he got involved in the Italian democratic veterans movement, but he retired from political life after the rise of the fascist regime. In 1926 he married Elena Albertini, daughter of Luigi Albertini, who in 1925 had been removed by the fascists from his position as Director of the newspaper Corriere della Sera. Carandini then became chief administrator of the Torre in Pietra estate near Rome, transforming it into a modern agricultural enterprise. During the years of fascism he came into closer contact with democratic opposition groups around liberal philosopher Benedetto Croce and developed ideas of a modern reformatory liberalism, based on the principle of social justice.

In May 1943, two months before the overthrow of Benito Mussolini, he started writing liberal pamphlets and organized their distribution in the Roman underground. In August, he found himself with other liberal individuals such as Leone Cattani, Alessandro Casati and Mario Pannunzio to refound the Italian Liberal Party (PLI).

After the armistice of September 8 and the German occupation of Rome he was a member of the underground Comitato di Liberazione Nazionale (the political organization of the Italian Resistance) and, after the liberation of the Italian Capital on June 4, 1944, he became Minister in the antifascist Bonomi government. In November of that year he was sent to be Italy's first Ambassador in Great Britain after the end of the fascist regime (which still existed as a German satellite state in Northern Italy until April 1945). He proved to be an efficient diplomat in his efforts to regain British confidence in the new Italian democratic government, but wasn't able to avoid his country being treated as a loser of World War II by the British and their Allies in the upcoming Peace Treaty.

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