Nobel prize-winning Italian playwright, actor and director Dario Fo has died in Milan aged 90, officials announced on Thursday.
Fo passed away late on Wednesday at Milan's Sacco hospital after being admitted after being admitted 12 days ago with respiratory problems, the officials said.
"With Dario Fo, Italy loses one of the great protagonists of theatre, culture and the civil life of our country," said Italy's premier Matteo Renzi.
"His satire, his research his work on set, his multi-talented artistic activity are the enduring legacy of a great Italian in the world," added Renzi, who was often lampooned by Fo.
The atheist Fo's subversive humour won him cult status and he was famed for his cutting political satire in plays such as his internationally renowned 'Accidental Death of an Anarchist' written in 1970.
He clashed with the Catholic Church over his works including the 1953 play 'A Finger in the Eye' that parodied what Fo saw as myths constructed under Fascism.
The Vatican also denounced his most celebrated work in Italy, 'A Comic Mystery', a series of short scenes from the Bible as told by those marginalised in society. Fo co-wrote the play with his wife and muse Franca Rame, who he was married to for almost 60 years until her death in 2013.
Fo said on his 90th birthday that he continued to dream each night that his late wife was still alive.
"Franca and I lived three times more than other people," he said.
Fo was active until the end of his life. On 20 September in Milan he presented his new book 'Darwin' a biography of the 19th-century naturalist, geologist and theorist of evolution Charles Darwin.
Fo also attended a rally last month in support of the anti-establishment Five-Star Movement and held an exhibition in July in the Adriatic port city of Cesanatico of his paintings, graphics, sculptures and puppets.
Fo won the Nobel prize for literature in 1997.
"He emulates the jesters of the Middle Ages in scourging authority and upholding the dignity of the downtrodden," the Nobel Foundation said announcing his win.
