The scene took place on the evening of September 4 on TG1, the television news programme on the first RAI channel, the most watched in Italy. We saw Gennaro Sangiuliano, Giorgia Meloni’s minister of culture, shed tears as he revealed that he had had an extramarital affair and asked his wife for forgiveness live on air. A sequence redolent of a soap opera that quickly took a political turn when the minister also asked for forgiveness from the head of the post-fascist government. Gennaro Sangiuliano explained that he had submitted his resignation to Giorgia Meloni, who rejected it.
For several days now, the press has been widely reporting on the publications of Maria Rosaria Boccia, a 40-year-old from Pompeii, who claims to be one of the minister’s close collaborators. The problem is that no one seems to know her, at least outside the minister’s inner circle. It all started on August 26. On her Instagram account, Maria Rosaria Boccia posted a message in which she thanked Mr. Sangiulano for her appointment. Ministerial advisor for major events “. Information denied on television by the minister, forced to reveal his romance live.
Still unknown to the general public a few weeks ago, Maria Rosario Boccia, who worked in event planning, especially in the fashion sector, seems to have had official duties, being associated with the preparations for the summit of culture ministers of the G7 scheduled for the end of the month in Pompeii.
Excitement on social media
The political and emotional turmoil in which the Minister of Culture has plunged has not ceased to bring to the surface the blunders to which he is accustomed. A year ago, during the presentation of the Strega Prize, the main literary award, he admitted not having read any of the books whose selection he had been part of. In June, speaking at a festival on Italian cultural identity in Sicily, the minister said that Christopher Columbus had undertaken his circumnavigation based on the theories of Galileo… born seventy-two years later.
Every blunder by the minister stirs up social media – such as when he places Time Square in London – and reinforces the impression of amateurism surrounding Giorgia Meloni. It is inconceivable that the Minister of Culture remains in office for just one more day.” thundered an editorialist of The Republic.
Faced with the new national narrative that Giorgia Meloni intends to impose, Gennaro Sangiuliano called for the creation of a “new Italian imagination” which would materialize in particular in the revaluation of a classical heritage in the face of a culture considered too predominantly left-wing. “Dante Alighieri is the founder of right-wing thought in Italy,” The minister was not afraid to say this.
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