Historic leftwing daily L'Unita' changed hands on Tuesday when it was bought by centre-left Sicilian regional governor and Tiscali founder Renato Soru.
Commenting on the deal, the former dotcom magnate said he had decided to buy the paper to preserve ''an asset to culture and democracy''.
The ex-Communist daily was founded by revered Marxist thinker Antonio Gramsci in 1924 and was the official mouthpiece of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) until 1991.
After the PCI dissolved, the paper struggled to stand on its own feet as an independent organ and was forced to close in 2000 after daily sales dropped to below 50,000 copies.
It returned to the shelves eight months later after being bought by Nuova Iniziativa Editoriale and has since managed to recoup sales of 120,000-130,000.
Democratic Party (PD) leader Walter Veltroni, who edited the paper in the early 1990s, said Soru's purchase would ''close a long phase of financial uncertainty'' and give the paper a chance to develop in order to ''meet political and market challenges''.
