Raffaele Costa died on September 11, 2026, three days after his 90th birthday. The Italian politician, born in Mondovì on September 8, 1936, spent 27 years in the Chamber of Deputies, held three cabinet posts, and finished his public career as president of the province of Cuneo.
Costa graduated from the University of Turin before entering national politics. He won a seat in the Chamber of Deputies in 1976, representing the Italian Liberal Party. He stayed in the lower house until 2003, outliving the party he first served. The Liberals were swept away in the early 1990s by the tangentopoli corruption investigations, which dismantled Italy's postwar party system. Costa then moved to Forza Italia, the party Silvio Berlusconi founded in 1994.
His cabinet career came in that same turbulent stretch. Costa served as minister for the coordination of community policies and regional affairs, then as minister of transport and navigation, and finally as minister of health. All three posts fell in the early 1990s, a period of rapid government turnover as the old parties collapsed and new ones formed in their place.
He left the Chamber of Deputies in 2003 and moved to the European Parliament, where he sat from 1999 until 2004. His last elected office was president of the province of Cuneo, a role he held from 2004 to 2009.
His son, Enrico Costa, followed him into politics.
The arc of Costa's career maps the transformation of Italian political life in a single biography. He entered parliament as a Liberal, part of the centrist coalitions that governed Italy for decades after the war. He left as a Forza Italia deputy, a member of the personalist machine Berlusconi built on the ruins of the old order. Few politicians crossed that divide so directly.
The health ministry was his most visible post. Costa took it over during a stretch when Italian health policy was being restructured, with regional governments gaining authority over hospital funding and administration. His earlier portfolio, coordinating community policies and regional affairs, put him at the intersection of European integration and Italy's own devolution debates, issues that defined the country's politics through the 1990s.
At the European Parliament, Costa sat in the chamber during the introduction of the euro, the single most consequential currency change in the continent's history. His time in Brussels and Strasbourg ran from 1999 to 2004, covering the first years of the new currency's physical circulation.
The move to Cuneo provincial government was a return to his roots. Mondovì sits in the province of Cuneo, in the Piedmont region, and Costa spent his final elected years administering the territory where he was born. He held the presidency from 2004 to 2009, then retired from public office.
His son Enrico Costa built his own career in the Chamber of Deputies, serving in various center-right governments. The family name remained in Italian politics even after Raffaele Costa stepped away.
Costa's death on September 11, 2026 came at 90, three days after his birthday. He was a Virgo by the calendar, born in the first week of September 1936, in a small Piedmontese town that would later send him to Rome, Brussels, and back again. The provincial presidency was his last stop, the place where a national career ended in the same region where it began.
According to Dead-People.