Ernesto Assante

Ernesto Assante (12 February 1958 – 26 February 2024) was an Italian music critic, essayist and journalist. He has been described as 'a prophet of contemporary journalism back in the 1990s'.

Life and career
Born in Naples, Assante started his career as a collaborator of some Roman private radios and as a music journalist for the newspapers  and Il manifesto. Starting from 1978, he was a long-time collaborator of La Repubblica, for which he served as editor-in-chief, and also founded its official website repubblica.it and directed the Kataweb portal.

Later, he collaborated with numerous publications, notably Rolling Stone, L'Espresso and Rockol, wrote numerous books, and was also a radio and television writer and occasional presenter, a festival artistic director, and a lecturer at the Sapienza University of Rome.

Assante died of heart attack on 26 February 2024, at the age of 66.