Clare Royce Spaventa obituary

My mother, Clare Royce Spaventa, who has died aged 87, was an economist who worked for the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in Rome and then as a researcher at Cambridge University. When marriage led to a new life in Italy, she chose to focus less on her promising career for the benefit of her family.

Fiercely intelligent, Clare was one of the few women of her generation to be admitted to Cambridge, where she read economics (1952-55). She went on to Stanford, then to work for the FAO in Rome around 1958, before returning to Cambridge as a researcher. It is during this second time there that, through Amartya Sen, she met Luigi Spaventa, also an economist. They decided to get married in great haste, in 1962 – there was no internet then, and phoning and travelling were extraordinarily expensive.

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