Professor Giorgio Bernini, a former honorary president of the International Council for Commercial Arbitration (ICCA) and a prominent figure in the Italian arbitration community of the last century, passed away on 22 October 2020, aged 91.

Giorgio Bernini’s versatile professional life divided between academia, the legal profession and politics. Having graduated in 1950 from the University of Bologna, where he was born, Giorgio Bernini continued his studies abroad, first in Cambridge and then at the University of Michigan, where he was granted a LL.M. and a Ph.D. Once back in Italy, he pursued his academic career, teaching courses in European law and comparative law at the Universities of Padua and Ferrara and obtaining tenure in 1970 at his alma mater in Bologna, where he became full professor of commercial law in the Department of Economics. Even though his main field of expertise was antitrust law, he also wrote extensively on arbitration, being the author of one of the first handbooks published in Italy on this matter.

In the meantime, Professor Bernini started his own legal practice, setting up a boutique to then join the international firm Baker & McKenzie, where he became the head of their Bologna office. His fluency in foreign languages, his activities as Italian delegate at the UNCITRAL Commission (1969-1972) and the international connections of Baker & McKenzie’s network – one of the first foreign firms to establish operations in Italy – brought him more and more appointments as arbitrator in domestic and cross-border commercial arbitrations, also in connection with high-profile disputes. Among many others, he chaired the arbitral tribunal which decided the famous Pyramids case in 1983, rendering one of the first awards, then annulled by the French courts, allowing the ‘extension’ of the arbitration agreement to a non-signatory party.

Giorgio Bernini’s activities as arbitrator stopped in 1993 when he joined Forza Italia, the new political movement established by Mr. Berlusconi, who then appointed him as Minister of Foreign Trade in his first cabinet in 1994, a position that Professor Bernini held for two years. He then remained involved in politics, receiving governmental appointments, first as a member of the Italian competition authority, and then as Chairman of the Board of the Italian State-owned railways company.

As a boxer and rugby player in his youth, Professor Bernini was famous for his strong temperament, hidden behind a typically bolognese bonhomie. I experienced it once, when, coming back from a hearing in which we were both involved, we engaged in some small talk and briefly discussed a political matter while waiting for the passport control. Although he did not convince me as to the matter discussed (but I have to say to his honour that we started from quite different premises), his vigorous plaidoirie, which caught the attention of all the other passengers in the queue, was a master class on rethorica and ability in arguing, which I still remember and for which I am still grateful.