Valentino Castellani was an Italian politician and academic. Born in the Friuli Venezia-Giulia region, he obtained a high school science diploma, then won a scholarship for the university college of the Polytechnic of Torino, where he moved in 1958.
In Torino, he graduated in electronic engineering (1963) then moved to the USA where he obtained his master’s degree at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1965. From its foundation in 1977, he was president of CSI-Piemonte (Consortium for Information System) for 10 years. This was an IT company born from an agreement between the Region of Piemonte and University and Polytechnic of Torino.
Castellani was mayor of Torino from 1993 to 2001. During his reign as mayor significant results were obtained in urban planning such as the railway link and the construction of the underground. In his second term as mayor, the most important incident of this period was the awarding of the XX Winter Olympic Games in June 1999, which entailed a relaunch of a wave of further urban transformations.
In December 1999 Valentino Castellani was appointed president of TOROC, the organizing committee of the XX Winter Olympic Games, a position that remained his full-time activity after the finished his second term as mayor of Torino in 2001.
Italy