The president of Italy, officially titled President of the Italian Republic (Italian:

Presidente della Repubblica Italiana), is the head of state of Italy. In that role, the president
represents national unity, and guarantees that Italian politics comply with the Constitution.
The president is the commander-in-chief of the Italian Armed Forces and chairs the High
Council of the Judiciary. A president's term of office lasts for seven years.[2] The incumbent
president is former constitutional judge Sergio Mattarella, who was elected on 31 January
2015,[3] and re-elected on 29 January 2022.[4]

Qualifications for office

The framers of the Constitution of Italy intended for the president to be an elder statesman of
some stature. Article 84[2] states that any Italian citizen who is fifty or older on election day
and enjoys civil and political rights can be elected president. The article also states that the
presidency is incompatible with any other office; therefore, the president-elect must resign
any other position before being sworn in.

The 1948 Constitution sets the presidential term at seven years. It does not put any term limit
on the presidency,[2] although until 2013 no president ever ran for a second term. On 20 April
2013, President Giorgio Napolitano agreed to run for a second term in an attempt to break the
parliamentary deadlock in the 2013 presidential elections and was duly reelected the same
day.[5] However, he made it clear that he would not serve his full term and resigned in January
2015.

Election
Main article: Italian presidential elections

The president of the Italian Republic is elected by an electoral college of about 660 members
(1,009 in the 2022 election, before the 2020 Italian constitutional referendum which reduced
the number of elected parliament members). It comprises both chambers of the Italian
Parliament—the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate of the Republic—meeting in joint
session, combined with 58 special electors appointed by the regional councils of the 20
regions of Italy. Three representatives come from each region (save for the Aosta Valley,
which due to its small size only appoints one), so as to guarantee representation for localities
and minorities. The electoral college currently consists of:

 Deputies (400)
 Senators (200 elected, plus a small and variable number of senators for life)
 Regional representatives (58)

According to the Constitution, the election must be held by a secret ballot, with the senators,
deputies and regional representatives all being required to vote. A two-thirds vote is required
to elect on any of the first three rounds of balloting and after that a simple majority suffices.
The number of rounds has often been large thanks to the secret ballot and fragmented nature
of the Italian Parliament.[6] The election is presided over by the president of the Chamber of
Deputies, who calls for the public counting of the votes. The vote is held in the Palazzo
Montecitorio, seat of the Chamber of Deputies, which is expanded and re-configured for the
event.
There is no formal personal candidacy but only proposals from groups within the electoral
college or from groups of no fewer than half a million citizens, so any citizen may be voted
or elected, regardless of any expressed intention to be a candidate.
Members of the electoral college, mostly being part of political parties, can make public or
undisclosed agreements between each other on a name to vote as candidate, but the votes
during the ballot remain secret as only the candidate's name is revealed but not the voter who
wrote it so it's not always clear, especially to the public, if such agreements are there and if a
party or a group of voters actually comply with them during a ballot.
For these reasons, during the ballots, there could be votes for public figures not related to
politics (actors, singers, soccer players for example or even fictitious characters) or non
feasible candidates. Those kinds of votes are not fully beyond a political strategy, considering
they're secret and that the first ballots requires a larger winning majority. They may be used
to express discontent about the potential actual candidates, to test or show if a candidate is
willing to become president at that moment, to spoil secondary candidates in order to increase
interest in main candidates for future ballots, to spoil a potential candidate of the adversary
party at the first ballots or to let other parties express their more interesting candidates before
a potential winning ballot.
Often a successful vote is reached when the major political parties within the chambers
reached an agreement on a willing candidate before that final ballot and their members
comply with such agreement during the vote.