Short answers, pulled from the story.
Alcide De Gasperi was an Italian statesman who served as prime minister of Italy in eight successive coalition governments from 1945 to 1953. He founded the Christian Democracy party, guided Italy's transition from monarchy to republic, and is considered one of the founding fathers of the European Union alongside Robert Schuman and Konrad Adenauer.
De Gasperi served as prime minister for eight years, from December 1945 to August 1953. His eight-year tenure remains a landmark of political longevity in modern Italian politics, making him the fifth longest-serving prime minister since the unification of Italy.
De Gasperi was arrested in March 1927 and sentenced to four years in prison. The Vatican negotiated his release, but a year and a half of imprisonment nearly broke his health. After his release in July 1928, he was unemployed and in serious financial hardship until 1929, when ecclesiastical contacts secured him work as a cataloger in the Vatican Library, where he remained until 1943.
The United States actively supported De Gasperi's Christian Democrats in the April 1948 election. The CIA channelled funds to anti-communist candidates with presidential approval, Joseph P. Kennedy and Clare Booth Luce helped raise US$2 million for Christian Democracy, Frank Sinatra made a Voice of America broadcast, and Time magazine featured De Gasperi on its cover dated the 19th of April 1948. The Christian Democrats won 48.5% of the vote, their best result ever.
The Gruber-De Gasperi Agreement was a treaty signed with Austria in September 1946 that established De Gasperi's home region of South Tyrol as an autonomous region. It was considered one of his most significant foreign policy achievements.
De Gasperi helped organize the Council of Europe, supported the 1951 Schuman Declaration that founded the European Coal and Steel Community, and worked toward a common European defence policy. In 1952, he received the Karlspreis from the city of Aachen. In 1954, he was elected president of the ECSC's Common Assembly, the forerunner of the European Parliament.