Be careful, American President Donald Trump is not the only politician who boasts a direct relationship with God, from whom he feels protected even in his more or less successful wars and truces while pursuing the Nobel Peace Prize. In Italy, he is well accompanied by his friend “Giuseppi,” the former prime minister who just told Aldo Cazzullo, in Corriere della Sera, that as a child he met Padre Pio and prayed to him for a long time after his death, until he changed interlocutor by addressing God directly, indeed.
Conte’s childhood memory is exceptional. He told the interviewer about those three little candles—only three—blown out with his parents beside him. Personally, I can’t even recall ten.
If he remembers well as a child, let alone as a young man, when for example Conte politically discovered Ciriaco De Mita, the most left-wing secretary the DC ever had, feeling “very close” to him. But then he began voting for Marco Pannella’s Radicals, who frankly were as unrelated to De Mita as cabbage is to a snack. In 2018, not before, when not coincidentally he became prime minister by designation of the Five Star Movement, he began voting for Beppe Grillo’s party. He did so with such conviction and ambition that he ended up, famously, ousting the founder, guarantor, exalted figure, and so on, and taking his place in the movement. A relatively meteoric career, now living in 2026.
As prime minister in two opposite editions, right-wing with Matteo Salvini as deputy prime minister and interior minister, and left-wing with PD ministers instead of the League’s, Conte honed his already strong childhood and adolescent memory enough to be able to tell well, as no one else could, the misadventure that befell him of losing Palazzo Chigi, despite having worked there better than all his predecessors, second in Marco Travaglio’s ranking only to Camillo Benso, Count, also of Cavour. Who, however, had never seen Palazzo Chigi in Rome from his Turin, much less experienced it.
What made him lose Palazzo Chigi—Conte told Cazzullo—after having wrested a good few billion from the European Union, on which Italy still lives, albeit badly managed by successors, were those whom we commonly and generically call the strong powers, Italian and international, better represented by Mario Draghi. Who in fact replaced him, not pushed by Matteo Renzi, who boasted about it and still boasts feeling like Mandrake, but moving on his own behind the scenes and the false representation of a man tired from the long toil as president of the European Central Bank and only wanting to rest.
Asked to provide proof, a clue of Draghi’s maneuvers, which he then helped punish by blocking his path to the Quirinale at the end of Sergio Mattarella’s first term, the shrewd, enigmatic Conte replied by suggesting to turn to Massimo D’Alema. From whom he would have learned precisely about those maneuvers. Who knows if the former prime minister, also the first and so far only post-communist to lead a government in Italy, will ever have the desire and opportunity to tell the facts to us as well…..
