Rome - L'Unita, the former official newspaper of the Italian Communist Party - for decades the largest in the Western world - was bought Tuesday by Renato Soru, an entrepreneur-turned-politician and founder of internet provider Tiscali. Soru, who as Governor of Sardinia heads the island's centre-left regional government, will set up a foundation to take over L'Unita from the Rome-based daily's current publisher, NIE, on June 5, news reports said.
Details on the value of the deal were not immediately available.
L'Unita was founded in 1924 by Italian communist leader, Antonio Gramsci, who, like Soru, was born in Sardinia.
Banned by Benito Mussolini's Fascist regime, L'Unita enjoyed a boom period following World War II when the Communist Party consolidated it position as Italy's second largest political movement behind the Christian Democrats.
The collapse of the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union prompted the party to drop its Marxist ideology and change into the Democratic Party of the Left, while L'Unita, except for Gramsci's name, ditched all reference to communism from its masthead.
In recent years the newspaper has been repeatedly accused by media tycoon-turned-politician, Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, of biased reporting aimed at discrediting him and his centre-right allies.
