Italian Culture Minister Gennaro Sangiuliano has resigned irrevocably this Friday evening, cornered by the scandal of his relationship with Maria Rosario Boccia. She is an alleged advisor to the ministry who, resentful of not having obtained an appointment, has been spreading photos, videos and internal documents on social networks for 12 days showing how during this summer she has participated in trips and official events without holding any position. The new head of the portfolio will be Alessandro Giuli, 48 years old, another former journalist who until now was the president of the MAXXI museum of contemporary art in Rome. Sangiuliano, a member of Giorgia Meloni’s far-right Brothers of Italy party, thus becomes the first minister to leave the Italian leader’s government, which came to power in October 2022. For Meloni, it has been a difficult blow to accept because she proclaims that her government is making history and is called to transform Italy, and this type of farce is, however, one of many vaudeville scandals that the country’s politics has experienced.
Sangiuliano, a 62-year-old former RAI and conservative newspaper journalist, tried to stop the soap opera on Wednesday by admitting on television, in tears, that Boccia, 41, had been his lover for three months and that he was going to appoint her as a minister, but that he finally stopped the process. Among other things, because of his wife’s insistence. Clinging to his position, he claimed that he had not spent a single euro of public money on her – he repeated this in his resignation letter – and Meloni believed him and defended him. But new revelations have emerged, there are many unanswered questions, in Italy the only thing people talk about is with all the jokes possible and the prime minister is furious. In addition, Boccia has accused the head of government of “sexist behaviour” for how she has referred to her. The situation has become unsustainable, because an unknown woman has the government in check and is waiting for what she publishes on Instagram.
The Court of Auditors is considering opening an investigation – there is already one by the Public Prosecutor’s Office following a complaint from the opposition – but the resignation was precipitated mainly because Boccia still seemed to have a good arsenal of compromising material to continue putting pressure on Sangiuliano and wearing down the Government. This small 41-year-old businesswoman, a graduate in Economics, who until now was unknown and who previously had a wedding dress shop in Pompeii, her village, has not given up. She has fought back and this Friday she even gave a long interview to the newspaper La Stampa where he reveals new details. For example, that there may be recordings of the calls that the minister made in his presence to Meloni and other members of the Government. Or that the Minister of Culture, he claims, was blackmailed by powerful people and media directors: “I am referring to some people who blackmail the minister for aid they have received.”
He also claims that, without holding any official position, he has had access to “the entire organisation of the G-7” of Culture that is being held at the end of the month in Naples, a delicate security issue that has raised the scandal to an international level. He also insists that all the official trips he has taken with the minister, a total of eight this summer, were paid for by the ministry and that sometimes they have gone together on private trips in the official car, such as to a Coldplay concert.
Boccia says that she acted as an advisor for major events at the ministry, although she did not have the official appointment, which never came, and at a certain point she decided to start recording Sangiuliano and everything he did. She explains why: “The minister told me: ‘I am the minister, I am a man, I represent the institutions and in the future no one will believe what you say.’” The unofficial advisor even recorded inside Parliament and the ministry wearing sunglasses with a hidden camera.
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This scandal has been the final straw for a minister who was already the subject of jokes for his frequent gaffes and tragicomic errors. As a judge at Italy’s most prestigious literary competition, the Strega, he said he had already cast his vote on the finalists, although he had not yet read them. He also said that Columbus arrived in America thanks to the theories of Galileo, born the following century, that Dante was the founder of the Italian right and that Times Square is in London. He rejected the use of anglicisms, which were damaging to the Italian language, as “radical chic snobbery”, a strictly Anglophone phrase.
If all this was already problematic, it has become even more so as he is at the head of a ministry with which Meloni wanted to end “the cultural hegemony of the left”, and which was called to be a pillar of his government action. But Sangiuliano’s management has been heavily criticised by the opposition, which claims that he has focused on internal purges of those who were not ideologically aligned with the Executive. In his resignation letter he thanked Meloni for having “defended him with determination and affection” and declared himself “proud of the results achieved in cultural policy”. Among his achievements, an exhibition of Tolkien and another of the futurists, which was the beginning of his supposed sociological turnaround of the country. In his farewell, he stated that “for the first time in Italy exhibitions have been organised on authors and people that the left had ignored for ideological reasons”. This was one of his obsessions, and for example, as soon as he arrived, he demanded a series about the journalist Oriana Fallaci, and they had to tell him that it had already been broadcast in 2015 on the public channel RAI, where he then worked.
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