Augusto Antonio Barbera

Barbera was born in Aidone on 25 June 1938. He obtained a degree in Jurisprudence with a specialization in constitutional law. Between 1967 and 1969 he worked abroad as a researcher at the universities of Karlsruhe and Heidelberg. Barbera was a lecturer of constitutional law at the University of Catania from 1969 to 1970. He then took up similar position at the University of Ferrara, where he would remain until 1977. In that latter year he started working at the Institute of Public Law of the faculty of political science of the University of Bologna. He stopped working there in 1994. In 2013 Barbera was named as one of 35 academics in a commission on constitutional reform under Prime Minister Enrico Letta. Barbera is a corresponding academic of the Academy of Sciences of the Institute of Bologna in the section of law, economics, and finance. ==Political career==

Barbera took up political office in 1976, when he was elected to the Chamber of Deputies for the Italian Communist Party. He would stay member of the Chamber until 1994. When the Communist Party dissolved in 1991, he stayed member of its successor party, the Democratic Party of the Left. From 1987 to 1992 Barbera served as president of the parliamentary committee on regional questions. On 29 April 1993 Barbera was one of three former Communist Party politicians named in the new Ciampi Cabinet; the other two were Vincenzo Visco and Luigi Berlinguer. Several hours after being officially named in the government, a rupture broke in the coalition over the handling of charges in Parliament against former Prime Minister Bettino Craxi. The Ministers of the Democratic Party of the Left, to which Barbera belonged, resigned. His replacement, Paolo Barile, took office on 4 May. On 16 December 2015, the Italian Parliament elected three candidates to the Constitutional Court of Italy: Franco Modugno, Giulio Prosperetti and Barbera. The election was realized after 31 previous failed attempts. Barbera was the candidate of the Democratic Party, he obtained 581 votes in favor. He was sworn in five days after his election. == Electoral history ==

• : Knight Grand Cross of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic (31 May 2017) ==References==