L'Europeo was a prominent Italian weekly news magazine launched on 4 November 1945, by the founder-editors Gianni Mazzocchi and Arrigo Benedetti.

Its political orientation was centrist, but it was also one of the few magazines during the Cold War willing to openly have dialogue with the Italian Communist Party.

"[8][9] In March 1954 the magazine denounced the U.S. ambassador in Rome, Clare Boothe Luce, of intrusion into Italian internal politics in a speech she made in January at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington.

She had mentioned electoral fraud perpetrated by the left at the June 1953 elections, advising the government on how to fight the communists.

After the denial of Mrs. Luce, a dispute broke out among various journalists including Nicola Adelfi, author of the first scoop, the famous Indro Montanelli, and Benedetti himself.

[11] Known journalists that worked for the magazine in the so-called "Benedetti school of journalism" were Tommaso Besozzi, Enzo Biagi, Giorgio Bocca, Oriana Fallaci, and Indro Montanelli, as well as photographers such as Federico Scianna and Oliviero Toscani.

In the years 1969 to 1972 L'Europeo published a series of her challenging interviews with prominent politicians such as Golda Meir, Indira Gandhi, Henry Kissinger, Yasser Arafat, Deng Xiaoping, Fidel Castro, and Ayatollah Khomeini.