So there is someone, at least in Italy, and I don’t know if finally or unfortunately, who manages to compete for space on the front pages of newspapers with that megalomaniac American president Donald Trump, who spends his days at the White House suspending or reigniting his own wars and those of his competitors around the world. Or covering his allies with insults more than his enemies.
It is the Minister of Culture – with a bronze plaque affixed to the facade of the building that houses him – Alessandro Giuli. He has just challenged his party, the same as Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s, and somewhat also the government by practically firing the technical secretary and the personal secretary on the spot, unsuccessfully defended especially by the undersecretary close to the Prime Minister Giovambattista Fazzolari. The one of the head, or reason, is Alfredo Mantovano, at least so far spared from the controversies instead earned in other matters also involving the usual judiciary. Which, perhaps, will find the time and way to also deal with the affair that seems to be at the origin of the crisis that exploded again in the Ministry of Culture, this time related to the lack of funding for a documentary about poor Giulio Regeni, killed in Egypt by scoundrels still protected by President Al Sisi. The other explosion concerned then Minister Gennaro Sangiuliano, who jumped up because of an intimate relationship.
Giuli, the dandy minister for the clothing he flaunts, including boots and bow tie, or the most dandy minister not wanting to completely wrong others, managed to surpass himself after clashing loudly with his party colleague and fellow journalist Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, the president of the Venice Biennale mistaken for a collaborator of Putin in the war on Ukraine.
More than his more or less personal affairs in the exercise of government functions, what strikes me personally about Giuli, those who appointed him, wanted him, recommended him, and his predecessors of opposite political sign, is the recklessness of Culture to which a Ministry was eventually assigned, created more than 50 years ago by Aldo Moro, even by decree law, for Giovanni Spadolini. Who, as a truly cultured man, and a journalist himself like Giuli and Sangiuliano, instead wanted it to be named “cultural heritage”. Even in this, different times and different men.
