Former Italian president Giorgio Napolitano died on Friday evening in a Rome hospital, several local media report. He was 98.
Napolitano, who was head of state from 2006 to 2015, was the longest-serving president since the founding of the modern Italian republic in 1946.
He was a longtime member of the Italian Communist Party, and a foremost member of a modernising faction on the right of the party.
Napolitano went on to become a leading member of the party's post-Communist successors, from the Democratic Party of the Left onward.
