Carlo Azeglio Ciampi, an Italian statesman who served first as a soldier, then a resistance fighter in World War II, and who, as finance minister half a century later, pushed for Italy to join Europe's currency union, died Friday after a long illness. He was 95.

 

Tributes to one of Italy's towering figures poured in quickly Friday. Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi expressed gratitude "for a man who served Italy with passion."

 

Former Premier Enrico Letta said in another message on Twitter that if "Italy is (still) a great country, the acknowledgment we owe Ciampi is enormous."

 

A commanding presence throughout Italy's postwar history, Mr. Ciampi long list of public offices included premier, central-bank governor and, finally, president from 1999 to 2006. After that, he was made a senator for life.

 

In 1940, he studied philology in Leipzig, the same place where, in a speech six decades later, he would speak about having discovered "another Germany that was opposed to tyranny."

 

After receiving a doctorate in literature in 1941, Mr. Ciampi was sent as a junior officer for the Fascist-era Italian army to Albania, but joined resistance forces in 1943 after an arduous nighttime trek across the rugged Majella mountains in southeast Italy, carrying a tract on liberal socialism in his socks.

 

As a government minister years later, he insisted a helicopter pilot fly through a miserable storm while showing fellow travelers the route he took to escape from a refugee camp in Scanno-a mountain village in Abruzzo, later made famous by Henri Cartier-Bresson's photographs-to Bari, on the Adriatic coast.

 

"Ciampi's background was different than that of most other public figures," said Fabrizio Barca, who was on that helicopter and worked with Mr. Ciampi at both the central bank and in government.

 

"Those around him were always more expert than he, but he was incomparably better as a commander," added Mr. Barca, whose father was also a celebrated resistance fighter.

 

Mr. Ciampi's managerial sense came from an ability to mix collegiality and conflict, allow younger voices to speak up, and then to forcefully make the final decision as if it were consensual, Mr. Barca said.

 

Mr. Ciampi's personal wartime story and decades as a civil servant-including, in 1993, becoming the first non-parliamentarian to run an Italian government since the republic was founded-gave him enormous credibility that, as president, he used to try to foster national pride.

 

In 2001, he proclaimed that the pro-Mussolini fascists and partisans, who fought each other after 1943, were equivalent, as all believed they were "honoring their country." Given his credentials, there was little grumbling outside of the old left.

 

A year later, he said that the world has "been changed by the same generation" that fought at El Alamein, a critical 1942 battle in Egypt that was the first decisive victory by the Allies. His comments sought to put soldiers on both sides on equal footing.

 

"The destiny of every nation is bound to the destiny of all others," was one of his favorite mottos.

 

That belief made him a pragmatist on the policy front.

 

As governor of the Bank of Italy, he gave a long and wide-ranging interview to the International Currency Review in 1980. It was a year after Italy had joined the new European Monetary System, and, pressed on how to address global economic imbalances, Mr. Ciampi said "some kind of compromise" was necessary between Western economies, oil-producing nations and underdeveloped countries.

 

"No agreement can be reached other than through compromise and negotiation," he said then, using an argument that has returned to the fore more recently among countries that are part of the eurozone.

 

At the time, Italy's annual inflation was running at 20% and labor unions were agitating. Mr. Ciampi, himself a longtime member of the left-wing CGIL union, warned that Italy's membership in any currency union could "degenerate into an empty gesture" if politicians didn't rein in inflationary policies.

 

In 1993, he left the Bank of Italy after 47 years-14 as governor-to become Italy's first "technocrat" premier.

 

His lone year in office involved convincing other Europeans that Italy should be allowed back into the monetary system-a precursor to the euro-after a large devaluation of the lira, and enduring a spate of Mafia killings that he later said had made him fear a coup d'état.

 

He was succeeded following elections in 1994 by the media tycoon Silvio Berlusconi. After that administration and another technocratic government, a new center-left prime minister, Romano Prodi, appointed Mr. Ciampi as finance minister in a bid to secure Italy's participation from the outset in the eurozone.

 

Mr. Ciampi brought his collegial style to the ministry, forcing his advisers into raucous debate, then proceeded to do all that was necessary to join the euro, recalled Mr. Barca.

 

In 1999, almost half a century after writing his graduate thesis on Favorinus of Arles-a French-born Greek sophist and formidable orator who died in Rome after decades of squabbling with emperors-Mr. Ciampi became president of the republic of Italy. He used that pulpit to endorse the idea that Europe should enshrine its unity with a constitution-an effort that ultimately failed when voters in France and the Netherlands rejected it.

 

He is survived by his wife, Franca and their two children.