Gianni Vernetti

Between 1993 and 1999, Vernetti was deputy mayor of Turin, in charge of public works, environment and sustainable development, and urban renovation.

He promoted the new Italian policies towards Central Asia implementing several development aid projects, and improving economic, commercial and military cooperation.

[2] He coordinated the Italian initiatives in Asia promoting several projects of economic, scientific, commercial and military cooperation, particularly between Italy and India, China, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, and Pakistan.

In 2008 Vernetti was elected for a third term in the Chamber of Deputies and he was a member of the Foreign Affairs Committee and the Italian Delegation to the NATO Parliamentarian Assembly.

In March 2022 he published the book "Dissidenti" for Rizzoli in which he analyzes the growing confrontation between democracies and autocracies, accompanying the reader on a journey through the mountains of Kurdistan, where the Kurdish fighters defeated the jihadist militias of ISIS; on the slopes of the Himalayas, where a handful of courageous monks saved the thousand-year-old Tibetan culture; in the small and combative Lithuania, which experienced all the totalitarianisms of the 20th century and today welcomes dissidents from Russia and Belarus; on the island of Taiwan, which resists Chinese authoritarianism.