Susanna Agnelli, 87, Fiat heir, pol

Susanna Agnelli, 87, granddaughter of Fiat SpA founder Giovanni Agnelli and the only woman to serve as Italy's foreign affairs minister, has died.

Ms. Agnelli died Friday at the Gemelli hospital in Rome, the news agency Ansa reported, without saying where it got the information. She was hospitalized last month after falling at her home, according to the report. Officials at the hospital's press office could not be reached for comment.

The third of seven children, she was a year younger than her brother Giovanni, known as Gianni, who served as president of Fiat, the automaker their grandfather started in 1899. When she was 13, her father, Edoardo, was killed in a plane crash. Her mother, Virginia Bourbon del Monte, a daughter of the prince of San Faustino and his Kentucky-born wife, Jane Campbell, died 10 years later in a car accident.

In her 1975 autobiography, We Always Wore Sailor Suits, Ms. Agnelli wrote about her sweet and bitter memories of a childhood among nannies and governesses in one of the richest families in fascist-controlled Italy and about how she became a World War II nurse with the Red Cross. The book was a bestseller in Italy and was translated abroad.

She was born April 24, 1922, in Turin. In 1945, she married Count Urbano Rattazzi, with whom she had six children from 1946 to 1956. They later divorced.

She embarked on a political career in 1974, serving as mayor of the Tuscan village of Monte Argentario. In 1976, she was elected to the Italian Parliament as a member of the Italian Republican Party, an ally of the then-ruling Christian Democrat Party.

She was deputy foreign minister from 1983 to 1991 and foreign minister from 1995 to 1996.