Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and the late Indiro Montanelli

The Financial Times reported today that Standard and Poor's downgraded Italy's sovereign debt rating. The downgrade will likely continue the political erosion of Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's regime. Many people feel it's time for Berlusconi, whose unbridled immorality and rapacious lust for power echo the unleashed id of some of the more depraved Caesars, to leave public service.

Indro Montanelli

I began thinking about this today as a result of my curiosity about a post-war Italian movie called Il Generale della Rovere. The film, directed by Roberto Rossellini, relates the story of a mole placed by the German occupation authorities into a Milan political prison. The Nazis' goal was for the spy, who pretended to be an Italian general, to learn the name of key Resistance figures. (The protagonist was played by Vittorio DeSica.) The story is allegedly based on the true life story of iconic Italian journalist Indro Montanelli, whose controversial life and work touches many Italian political, social, and cultural preoccupations between the rise of Fascism and the years following the kidnapping and murder of Prime Minister Aldo Moro. (The late Sicilian author Leonardo Sciascia discusses the Moro incident his interesting, but densely written book The Moro Affair.) In 1973, Montanelli broke with Italy's leading newspaper, Corriere della Sera, and founded Il Giornale, a right-wing newspaper that was eventually owned by none other than Silvio Berlusconi. According to Montanelli's Wikipedia biography, the journalist couldn't stand the man who would be king. "He lies as he breathes," Montanelli is reported to have said. Most observers today would agree with that terse, bitter assessment.

I don't have enough sense of contemporary Italy to grasp how the electorate could repeatedly make such a bleak choice for its prime minister. What's missing to explain it, I suspect, is someone with the intellectual weight of an Indro Montanelli.

For Italian language links regarding Montanelli, try these two for starters:

Fondazione Montanelli

A review from the Roman newspaper Il Messagero of Sandro Gerbi's and Raffaele Liucci's book on Montanelli, titled Montanelli l'anarchico borghese. (Sorry for the tortured syntax.)