Giorgio Freddi, professor emeritus at the University of Bologna, passed away last Monday at the age of 92. He was the first and most important political scientist to deal with bureaucracy. In his studies Freddi documented how in Italy the prevalence of “administrative rationality” over instrumental rationality has imprisoned the bureaucratic apparatus at the expense of efficiency. Freddi had specialized in the United States, at the Berkeley Campus of the University of California. After returning to Italy, he worked hard to root the empirical study of political phenomena in the Italian Academy (he was President of the Italian Society of Political Science) and in Europe, during his presidency of the European Consortium for Political Research. In the early 1980s, Freddi launched one of the first and most influential exercises in evaluating the National Health Service. He invited an American colleague, distinguished clinician and health organization expert Gerald Perkoff to Italy, toured the length and breadth of hospital facilities and wrote a highly critical report, particularly with respect to primary and territorial medicine. Freddi promoted a lively discussion, editing a volume for Il Mulino. It is sad to note how the shortcomings and defects discussed in that book are still unresolved forty years later.