Born into a working-class family of Corticella, a district of
Bologna (his father was a worker and the mother a housewife), Nesi participated in the partisan resistance and then graduated in law. Profoundly
Catholic, his first political experience was in the
Christian Democracy, but a choice was not linked to ideological reasons but by the conformist spirit, since in his city, the
Italian Communist Party (PCI) had 58% of the vote, while the DC trudged to 12% approximately. A friend of
Enrico Berlinguer, he participated with him to a mission in the
USSR and for this he was expelled from the "Crusader Shield" party (the DC). Despite the excellent relations he had with Belinguer he chose not to join the PCI. He entered instead in the
Italian Socialist Party, in the current driven by
Riccardo Lombardi, whose political alignment lay further left. Nesi became a banker by accident in 1967 when he was appointed vice-president of
Cassa di Risparmio di Torino after several Socialist leaders had refused the job. Shortly thereafter he created the office of PSI Credit and Insurance (of which he was chief from 1977 to 1978) and continued his climb unabated: he was president of the
Banca Nazionale del Lavoro (BNL) in the 1980s and until the fall of Berlin Wall, he worked as a business journalist at the
RAI in Turin and as an engineer at
Olivetti. Despite his economic situation, now being very wealthy, he wanted to stay in politics, always on the left and he was thus dubbed the "Red banker". His relations with
Bettino Craxi were not always positive and when in 1994 the PSI was gone, Nesi decided to join the
Communist Refoundation Party with which he was elected in 1996. In 1998, however, he broke away from the party of
Fausto Bertinotti, as he was against the no-confidence vote that the PRC gave
Romano Prodi, and co-founded the
Party of Italian Communists. From 2000 to 2001 he served as
Minister of Public Works in the
Amato II Cabinet. In 2001 he ran for the Chamber in
Liguria and won the seat thanks to the assistance granted by the center-left
Olive Tree coalition. On 15 April 2004 came out of the Italian Communists and joined the group of the
Italian Democratic Socialists with whom participated in the project of socialist unity. He was Vice President of "Commission Environment, Land and Public Works" in the XIV legislature. Nesi died in
Turin on 11 February 2024, at the age of 98. ==References==