Politicians From Italy

"It was impossible to socialise or joke with him. Cofferati is the trade unionist with whom I had the most difficulty on a personal level."

"Bruno Trentin liked mountaineering. When there was a match involving Italy, he rooted against them. Trentin gave the impression of intellectual coldness. But he was very nice. If we argued, we always ended up telling a joke."

"(About Silvio Berlusconi) He is very good at winning elections, but he cannot govern. He knows how to present himself, but he does not know how to administer."

"The personal party model that Berlusconi invented in the end is now imitated by everyone. What are they doing if not creating lots of personal parties? Bossi's party, Fini's party, Follini's party."

"(On the period of Mani pulite) There is no doubt that there were exaggerations. But the collapse of the Christian Democrats and the Italian Socialist Party was a political affair, not a judicial one. Healthy parties would not have been overwhelmed."

"Bondi, Schifani, Baget Bozzo cannot say three words in a row without mentioning Berlusconi."

"(On the example of turncoat) Adornato. From militant communist to Berlusconism, or rather to the height of Berlusconism."

"There is no such thing as the political climate, it is determined."

"When Berlusconi said that people don't work much in Italy, he didn't realise that since his government came to power, the number of strike hours has increased dramatically."

"(On Sergio Cofferati) In truth, he immediately withdrew from the national competition. He chose not to be defeated and to start over.*For me, the magic word is consultation. It's the word I grew up with.*The Reagan right considers consultation an obstacle. The antagonistic left considers it a betrayal."

"Ci sono delle donne, ma la donna non c'è."

"We have reached the point, a moment that has never been experienced since 1989: we need to reflect on the absolute need for a new, fairer and more sustainable world order."

"Therefore, a new effort of national cohesion is required, as well as a concrete commitment to guarantee peace even outside the borders of Europe itself, to contribute to the construction of a New world order. Guaranteeing international security, preventing and overcoming crises and conflicts in near and faraway areas, is a responsibility that we cannot shirk, that we cannot - neither as Italians nor as Europeans - delegate to others."

"[Napolitano] is my best Communist friend."

"We are dismayed at this death because of the void that Joseph Stalin leaves in his people and in humanity as a whole. Gentlemen, if you abandon your political hostilities for a moment, as I am abandoning them at this moment, you must recognise with me that this man's life coincided for thirty years with the course of humanity itself."

"Men of all political beliefs, friends and adversaries, must today recognise the immense stature of Joseph Stalin. He is a giant of history and his memory will not know sunset."

"I say to my opponent: "I fight your [political] faith which is contrary to mine but I am ready to fight to the price of my life so that you can freely express your thoughts". That is my position. That is, I am not a believer but I respect the faith of believers. I for example am a socialist but I respect the political faith of others and I discuss it. I debate with them, I argue with them but they are free to express their thoughts. I am democratic in that sense, really. ["Do you also respect the political faith of fascists?"] No. I fight it with a different spirit. Fascism for me cannot be considered a political faith. It sounds absurd what I say but it is so, fascism, in my opinion, is the antithesis of political faiths. Fascism is at odds with true political faiths. One cannot talk about political faith by talking about fascism. Fascism oppressed all those who did not think like it. Those who were not fascists were oppressed and therefore one cannot speak of true political faith to those who oppress the faiths of others. I fight but I fight on democratic ground."

"Well, neofascists who once again stand in the shadows and listen, I boast that I ordered the execution of Mussolini, because I and the others did nothing more than sign a death sentence pronounced by the Italian people twenty years earlier."

"He ended his day well, though too early for us and for the fate of the world. His last word was one of peace. Well, at this hour that is so sad for us, we hope that this call for peace, which reflects the will of all the workers of the earth, will not fall on deaf ears, but will be taken up by all those who hold the fate of peoples in their hands."

"The fate of the Italian working people was as close to Joseph Stalin's heart as the fate of his own people and that of all the peoples of the earth. He always fought for peace, aware that those who pay the highest tribute of blood and suffering, in war, are his peasants and workers. And as a good socialist, he knew that one should not want war in order to destroy what the present society has built, but should strive to transform the old society in order to build a new one. This was his firm will; this is what he fought for in his later years. He has always rejected any provocation, he has always renounced acts of force in order to defend this good that belongs not only to his people, but to all mankind."

"Gentlemen, you will all remember the anguished hours we lived through when the Nazi avalanche rolled over the Soviet Union. The Nazi armies already glimpsed the towers of the Kremlin and the peaks of the Caucasus. Well, we felt that if, by damned chance, the Soviet Union collapsed, with the Soviet Union - don't forget this, you who are listening to me - all hopes of a triumph of freedom over the Nazi-fascist dictatorship would have collapsed. At that moment we felt that men of all political persuasions held their breath in the knowledge that their fate was tied to the fate of Stalingrad. And Stalingrad became the Valmy of the October Revolution and offered the astonished world the miracle of a resounding victory, under the leadership of Stalin. Then we understood that from Stalingrad began the victory of democratic weapons against the weapons of barbarism!"

"The future of prosecco in Veneto can only rhyme alongside quality and sustainability."

"The sign of our coherence in our relationship with Israel is it does not depend on the difference of the changing governments in Israel but it's stable position."

"We have a very tough (when it's required), but open and fair dialogue with all the authorities, no hidden agendas, and at the end the day, this kind of dialogue has been very welcome by those governments."

"Peaceful living together between religions and cultures is possible if from the start we know how to identify the values in which we believe and if we recognise rules that apply to everyone. The real problem which we don't address, because Europe is suffering an identity crisis."

"A dream seems like a dream until you start working on it. And then it can become something infinitely greater. (Italian: Un sogno sembra un sogno fino a quando non si comincia a lavorarci. E allora può diventare qualcosa di infinitamente più grande.)"

"Often, the word utopia is the most convenient way to justify what one has not the will, ability, or courage to do. A dream seems like a dream until one begins to work on it. Only then does it become something infinitely bigger. (Italian: Spesso il termine utopia è la maniera più comoda per liquidare quello che non si ha voglia, capacità o coraggio di fare. Un sogno sembra un sogno fino a quando non si comincia a lavorarci. E allora può diventare qualcosa di infinitamente più grande.)"

"[On consumerism in times of crisis] I believe that distrust in the lira has pushed savers to dig up their bank accounts. Better to spend while the money has some value."

"Ettore Cozzani"

"Vittorio Cian, Voci del Risorgimento. , Nuova Antologia, Rome, C.E.1911."

"Vittorio Cian, La coltura e l'italianità di Venezia nel Rinascimento, Ditta Nicola Zanichelli, Bologna, C.E.1905."

"Vittorio Cian, How do I read? Question to the most famous writers of today, Felice Le Monnier, Florence, C.E.1935, pp. 74-76."

"The extraordinary qualities he possessed [Vincenzo Gioberti], explain the undiminished glory that surrounded and surrounds his name; The serious defects which he revealed explain that severity, great to the point of injustice, which some still judge, as I said earlier, his work as a politician. Certainly, this mighty apostle of the Italian cause did not – and could not have – equal to the practical qualities of a man of action and of statesman, the sense of reality that culminated, insuperably, in Camillo Cavour. He allowed himself to be guided or misled, at times, by feeling, by his own imagination and by pride, which at that time made him rigid and intolerant, almost as if by a theological habit of his mind. But in contrast to these defects, there is, above all else, a passion which dominated him all, which was his strength and his life, which purifies him and elevates in our eyes, the passion of his country. (p. 10)"

"The priestly robe or character, the halo of exile, the fame of eloquence, of doctrine, of austere virtue, the resurgent echoes of the Primacy, all conferred upon him Vincenzo Gioberti, on his pilgrimage [through the cities of the peninsula], as a missus dominicus, an apostle of the holiest of causes, the preacher of the most blessed of the crusades, the peacemaker for the noblest of wars. (p. 8)"

"[...] the Cavour was very different from what some liked to paint himself, such as the Brofferio, who dared to affirm that "he had no trace of letters". In fact, how wide that powerful mind was, open to every sense of modernity and culture, would suffice to attest to an anecdote that I recall here because it is very little known. In April C.E.1960, when he went to visit the Medici-Laurentian library in Florence, in the face of so many wonders of our classicism, both of antiquity and of the Renaissance, the great minister issued this sentence which he dedicated to the very new reformers of studies: "The Latin is like the bread that gives consistency to every food of national dignity, if we are to be of the Latin race." (p. 4)"

"Girolamo Donato, returning from Rome, where he had been ambassador to Julius II, lingered on the way to transcribe ancient Roman epigraphs; but when a pontiff, perhaps Alexander VI, dares to ask him in an ironic tone, whence the Venetians had received the privilege of the empire over the Adriatic Sea, he, the profound humanist, the eloquent orator, will not hesitate to retort with Venetian wit: "Show me your Holiness the instrument of the patrimony of St. Peter, and on the back you will see recorded the concession made to the Venetians of their dominion over the Adriatic." (p. 30)"

"The accusation that is not wrongly levelled at the Italian humanistic culture, of having alienated letters from reality, of having diminished their original power, of having subtracted so many forces from life, including political life, exhausting them in vain retching of aestheticism and literary mimicry, this accusation does not affect Venice except to a small extent. What was the rule elsewhere was the exception here. The new studies that in other regions aroused fanaticism and fatal fetishisms, here were appreciated only to the extent of the benefits they could bring to the homeland. Professional humanism, which was an end in itself or a means of profit, did not exist here or was a very exceptional case. (p. 27)"

"The best times, those of true reading, serene and collected, disinterested and, I would almost say, carefree, [are] the months of the holidays, when I am given to read in front of a wide open window, which grants me, in a delightful silence, the enchanting view of a green background at the bottom and a blue one at the top, and, between the two, the undulating line of the wild mountain. In those days I savor reading even more pleasantly, if done with voluptuous slowness, in the open air, on the grass and in the friendly shade of chestnut trees or the two old stone pines. Memories and hopes... (pp. 75-76)"

"During the months of the school year, my readings have what I would call essentially "professional" in character, which requires me to have a certain way of reading, since they are books pertaining either to the university course or to the theses to be examined, to the articles to be written or to the work on the loom, to the book material indispensable for fulfilling that other duty of "keeping ajoined". In these cases, I read as a scholar can read, pressed by the tyrannical need to quickly test, with an unpleasant strain of nerves and brain, the printed paper that the post office spills every day on the desk of the director of the Historical Journal, of a teacher and a little, also, of a politician: books, pamphlets, magazines, newspapers, who claim their right to a reading, even if this is often reduced to a furtive and fugitive glance, or to a melancholy postponement to better times. (p. 75)"

"First of all, a statement. I think I am a rather irregular reader, that is, not too methodical and far from a slave to strict habits; but in my irregularity, which is quite normal, because I am not mistaken, I am different, from almost all scholars. Anyway, here are my confessions. I read in the most varied ways, depending on the moment and occasion, the mood and nerves and therefore the mood; according to the seasons, as well as to the contingent conditions of life, for which I find myself now in the city, now in the country, today on the train, and tomorrow in my study, or in a more or less private room of a public library. Finally, they vary according to the material that can be read, the one that more than anything else perhaps decides the way and, I would say, the rhythm of reading, determining the degree of intellectual tension, that is, of adequate attention and recollection, still marking the pace, which can be a very slow pace, like a run or a flight. But I think all this happens to almost every scholar. (p. 74)"

"[On tourism from abroad] Italy has more foreigners than anyone else, but its gain is not the greatest."

"[For the C.E.1963 general elections] Motivational confessions had explained that, in the unconscious of the average Italian, the Dc more than a Father she was a Mother, or rather a matron: the little woman of Guareschi and Candido, weighed down by the years and unsuitable to guide the search for our new frontera. Did we want to "sell" the center-left? Well, let's try that old saleswoman. And we would have noticed. From"

"[On the request to Sandro Pertini to grant an amnesty for less serious crimes] I raised the hypothesis of amnesty not as a proposal, but as one of the measures that is usually talked about when dealing with the problem of prison overcrowding, which is a real fact of our situation."

"[About Germany and Austria] The Grifagna Eagle | which brings two beaks to devour more. (from Verses and prose by Luigi Alamanni, edited by Pietro Raffaelli, vol. I, Florence, C.E.1859, p. XXVIII)"

"Luigi Alamanni, Verses and prose, Felice Le Monnier, Florence, C.E.1859."

"Luigi Alamanni, On cultivation, in Versi e prose, edited by Pietro Raffaelli, 2 vols., Felice Le Monnier , Florence, C.E.1859, vol. II."

"Luigi Alamanni was certainly a noble and graceful poet: and yet, with all the elegances that he has scattered liberally here and there in Coltivazione, few read the six books of his blank verses: if we take away ours who therefore look for many strange and kind ways of speaking well. (Salvatore Betti)"

"For then my tongue understands in vain | To complain about her, even if every day | Does the heart burn with false flattery? | How I wish until the dawn comes, | Cintia, I'll stay with you the whole night, | Nor then leave me all day again! (From Elegia- He protests his love to his wife, cruel as she is, p. 11)"

"How hard it is, when you show your face serenely to others, to feel sadness and boredom, and laugh and cry in your heart! (from Elegia – He protests his love to his wife even though cruel, p. 10)"

"O miserable one who binds the soul | In his hot desires, which always then | For him it turns red, turns white, burns and freezes. (from Elegia – He narrates the cruelty of Love, and begs him to leave him alone, p. 10)"