Early life

Vespa was born in L'Aquila, Abruzzo. He is married to Augusta Iannini, who is a judge.

Journalist career

Vespa began working with the local press in his native Abruzzo at a relatively young age, authoring sports articles for the L'Aquila branch of the newspaper Il Tempo when he was sixteen years old.

In 1962 he became a radio announcer on RAI broadcasts and, after obtaining his LL.B. in 1968, began hosting the daily newscast Telegiornale RAI (afterwards renamed TG1).

During the 1970s and 1980s, he undertook several controversial and ground-breaking projects, mainly as a foreign correspondent for RAI, interviewing many soon-to-be-influential personalities of the decades (for example, Vespa interviewed then-Cardinal Karol Wojtyła in 1977, a full year before his election to the pontificate).

In 1977 he co-hosted, with Arrigo Petacco, the news programme Tam Tam, moving the following year to a different format, precursor to that of Porta a Porta, where up-and-coming personalities and current events were discussed in front of a live studio audience, which participated to the exchange through Q&A sessions (hence, the program was called Ping Pong).

In June 1984 he was named "official commentator" for the live, televised broadcast of the state funeral for Enrico Berlinguer, who had been the leader of the Italian Communist Party. During the broadcast, he erroneously announced that Pietro Valpreda had been found guilty of the Piazza Fontana bombing, whereas he was a mere suspect, at the time—a mistake for which he publicly apologised on several occasions.

Between 1989 and 1992, while he was the head newscaster for the RAI news programme TG1, he came under attack for publicly declaring that he considered the ruling party Christian Democracy his "editorial sounding board"; because RAI stations are state-owned and publicly funded, they are expected to be unbiased, which Vespa's words indicated not to be the case.
On 11 January 1991,^[1] the RAI aired the interview to Saddam Hussein and Vespa become the unique Italian journalist to have interviewed the Iraqi leader.^[2][3][4] In August 1990, when the Gulf War erupted, he supported the armed intervention in a much-criticised editorial that concluded that "War has been brought forth by the international community. And if we want to be members of that club, we must pay our dues."

Since 1996, Vespa has been at the helm of the news programme Porta a Porta, where much of Italy's political debate takes place, so much so that it is sometimes sarcastically referred to as "the third house" (together with the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate) of the Parliament of Italy. In 2000, his wife Augusta Iannini closed definitely the inquiry conducted in 1992–1993 by the Italian Public Prosecutor of Palmi, Agostino Cordova, on the relations between mafia and the Italian Freemasonry. In 1994, Cordova was transferred to Naples and the inquiry had been moved to the Procura della Repubblica of Rome, where it didn't have any progress for the following six years.^[5]

On 3 April 2006, Vespa moderated the second televised debate between then-Prime Minister of Italy Silvio Berlusconi and the leader of the centre-left coalition Romano Prodi. In the same year, Vespa found himself at the centre of a political scandal after a telephone conversation he had with Salvatore Sottile, spokesperson for politician Gianfranco Fini, concerning an upcoming episode of Porta a Porta. During the (intercepted) conversation, Vespa indicated that he would "custom-tailor" the program to suit Fini's needs, requesting, in fact, that the politician's aide select the chosen adversary for the scheduled face-to-face. Since the programme publicly prided itself on creating an unbiased turf for political confrontations, Vespa's integrity was called into question,^[6] going as far as to be discredited, due to his perceived "servitude" towards right-wing politicians, especially Berlusconi, and a tendency of asking softball questions on most of his shows. This has led to some in the Italian media establishment calling Vespa a "regime servant", most famously by now-deceased journalist Giorgio Bocca.

In February 2012 a photo of Italian troops who were killing Slovene civilians (as a retaliation because Tito's partizans killed Italian soldiers) was shown by the host Vespa on TV as if being the other way round. When historian Alessandra Kersevan, who was a guest, pointed it out to Vespa that it is Slovenes in the photo who were killed and not vice versa, he did not apologize. A diplomatic protest followed.^[7][8]

Vespa is credited with having a position of strong allegiance towards Silvio Berlusconi.^[9][10]

He received the America Award of the Italy–USA Foundation in 2018.