Television Presenters

"So I was worried to go back. I didn't have any friends in Korea. I felt like I was immigrating back to the environment that I'd been living in."

"As we saw in the AVP (audio-visual presentation), the audience will play a significant role in this journey alongside our mentors and judges."

"We never went on a family vacation. It was our first time traveling as adults. It was fun, I was thankful."

"‘I'm not showing these views to my family. I'm not buying these tasty food to my family and only bring my friends."

"A guest who made things difficult for me? Only one, Roberto Benigni, whom I love too much, though. The first time he came on the show, while they were filming us from the waist up, he gave me a sharp blow to the genitals with his hand that left me breathless."

"(About the 1999 Sanremo Festival) The record companies have offered nothing this year. If it is to be a festival for everyone, for ordinary people, then the headmistress must present Battiato and Fossati. Because if the headmistress announces Gatto Panceri, then we are faced with nothing presenting nothing. This game is also the result of years and years of television made in the name of “specific incompetence”. [...] The offspring of those programmes [...] where people play at being out of tune. And of all the other dozens of programmes full of “common people”."

"I’m happy that I can help these dreamers get closer to Korea."

"It feels so good to be back home. This is my second home, and it’s always wonderful to be here."

"Hearing the cheers again made me emotional."

"I’m thankful to everyone who supported me during my 'Star Circle Quest' days. Now it’s time for these dreamers to shine on stage, and we’ll do our best to help them reach their dreams."

"I was having dinner at the Dollaro, a restaurant in Milan that cost 660 lire, the equivalent of one dollar. Instead of spaghetti, the waiter brought a guitar and started singing. ‘What a voice!’ I thought. It was Al Bano. During the day he worked at Breda, in the evening he waited tables. I told him to come to Rai the next morning."

"Interviewer: Which Sicilian writer do you love the most? Baudo: There are many, from Capuana to Verga, whose I Malavoglia I love very much. Then there is Pirandello, before whom one should kneel. And how can we forget Leonardo Sciascia? I knew him personally and we had a good friendship; I spent days with him. He was shy. I remember once I had to present an event in Mondello to award him and he asked me if there was a way to do it without doing it publicly. It was hard to convince him to go on stage! He was the one who discovered Tomasi di Lampedusa. He called Sellerio, a publishing house in Palermo, which published his book."

"Roberto Vecchioni is a betrayed lover, which is why he said that phrase: his is an appeal for love, not an indictment of Sicily. There is beauty in Sicily; Sicily is beautiful. Of course, Vecchioni could have avoided generalising, but I am convinced that he already regrets having uttered those words. Long live the good and beautiful Sicily that exists."

"Sicily is extraordinary, there is so much to see, it is a heritage of beauty and culture. When you arrive in Messina, a few kilometres away is Taormina, then Catania for its Baroque architecture, continue on to Syracuse, which in addition to its Baroque architecture has an important Greek history, it is sensational. Then Noto, Modica and Ragusa. The latter city has always had extraordinary beauty that was previously ignored, and thanks to Montalbano, the entire province of Ragusa has had a major revival from a tourist point of view. Then there is the western part, Mazara del Vallo, the island of Mozia. Then there is Agrigento with its temples, Segesta and then Palermo. In short, Sicily is worth visiting, it is extraordinary."

"When I started with 2NE1, I was grateful for the support I received."

"(About Matteo Salvini) He speaks properly, he's a rhetorician. But he doesn't convince me. He went to Sicily, to Mineo, where there are reception centres, and organised a Southern League when his League was founded as an anti-terrorist organisation. Suddenly, he embraced the southern cause. He did so to broaden his voter base. Then Salvini imagines a country blocked at its borders, which is no longer conceivable. Anyway, we Sicilians are used to being invaded. First Grillo arrived by swimming, and nothing changed. Now Salvini himself has arrived."

"Sicily needs a cultural revolution. It has top-level professionals, teachers, doctors and architects, but they don't get their hands dirty with politics and have delegated it to these professional politicians."

"Sicilian beauties have an extra gear determined by historical factors. Mixed blood and the stratification of different dominations have mixed genes to such an extent that they have produced different combinations. [...] Contrary to tradition, we produce very tall women who are growing taller and taller, with physical characteristics ranging from raven-haired to blonde, with hazel, green and blue eyes, depending on whether Arab, Spanish or Norman characteristics predominate."

"I arrived in Rome in 1959. Italy was celebrating, there was an atmosphere of happiness and a zest for life. Those years were too good to be true. Italians were happy, every initiative was successful. Those years will never return. The Fiat 600 was the dream of Italians, in fact it was the consolation prize on “'Lascia o raddoppia?”' I owned a 500, bought in 36 instalments. I had just arrived in Rome, but I had to keep up appearances. I still don't know how I managed to get in: every time, I had to open the roof to do so."

"(About Alida Chelli) She was ill, she fought and suffered a great deal: she no longer liked herself, she didn't want to be seen, I only heard from her on the phone, who knows, perhaps in the end death was a liberation. However, Simone was by her side, in love with his mother."

"Maurizio Costanzo used a soft tone, asking even the most uncomfortable questions gently, but it was impossible to dodge his questions. Costanzo, as a secular confessor, did not pass judgement, but left everything to the viewer's discretion. (p. 134)"

"Our land has suffered much moral and material devastation. Even nature has sometimes raged against our land through earthquakes. Yet what has remained intact? An infinite beauty, unique in the world, has remained. Just travel around our Sicily, the coasts, the interior of Sicily, to discover a beauty that our ancestors, our forefathers, have left us as a legacy, perhaps confident that we would respect this nature, that we would exalt it... which we have not done. This land, without a future, is dead, finished, gone, and young people will find nothing but rubble and devastation. “My bitter land”, bitter... and beautiful. Beauty will prevail, I am sure. Beauty will triumph."

"The new is an obsession; there is no such thing as something new. Sometimes when you do something old, you don't do it as you used to, but you do it with a rhythm, a cadence and a language that are modern. Yesterday and today do not exist as artistic categories; there is only what is beautiful or ugly."

"(About the 1999 Sanremo Festival) I really don't understand all this enthusiasm. [...] It's all the same. [...] The only difference is the attitude of Fazio and his team: it's almost as if they're apologising for holding the festival. But that's not how you put on a show. Sinatra didn't sing while apologising, circus acrobats aren't ashamed. Interviewer: “The Sanremo circus had ended up in a bad crisis, though...” Baudo: I'm not questioning Fazio's formula, he's good, it works and you can see that. The problem is the songs. He doesn't even announce them anymore, he doesn't even touch the singers. As if they were made of contagious material. At this point, then, we need to dismantle everything definitively, resign ourselves to the idea that the festival is no longer a song contest that people will then buy and sing. And turn it into something else, an Isle of Wight. [...] at this point, the festival is over."

"Writing it has been an incredibly emotional journey for me. Opening parts of my life that were once private, painful, or quietly carried has been both daunting and liberating."

"[Purgatori replies that he wrote a spy novel for many reasons, the first being:] because, having met many spies from the East, the West and many other countries over many years of work, I also wanted to portray their human side, which is very different from what we imagine. They are women and men like us, and like us they experience emotions, feelings, joys and sorrows, and it is curious, shall we say, that they have to live them, in a way, in the shadows. Even if sometimes these feelings then undermine the carefully planned projects that are supposed to change the world order."

"Oliviero was more cultured than me, quicker to understand, better at connecting the details and symptoms of the malaise that ate away at our future, if not entirely, then at least in large part. But he had one quality: he refused to give up. And so far, the journalist, the writer. Then there was the man. Or rather, first and foremost, the man. Generous and welcoming. In his own way, which was a beautiful way. His family knows what I'm talking about, his children know what I'm talking about. His grandson will know too."

"During my career as a journalist, I have met too many spies to enjoy an unrealistic narrative; none of those I met looked like James Bond. Rather, I have always been fascinated by the Stasi headquarters I visited and that part of the secret archive that was destroyed. There is a black hole in our collective memory that has never been thoroughly investigated. [...] We continue to be [in the aftermath of the Cold War] up to our necks, just think of Russiagate... Or the submarine in which 14 Russian sailors recently died. It is most likely a vehicle used for special intelligence operations."

"[...] I met Fiorenzo Angelini. At the time, he was only a bishop, but already the éminence grise of Catholic healthcare, with his fingers in five hospitals in Rome, four hundred properties and eight thousand hectares of agricultural land around the capital. He was the Giulio Andreotti of the Vatican, of whom he was a close friend. I met him in Kisima or Baragoi, I don't remember exactly. Anyway, on the road -so to speak- that led to Loiyangalani, on the shores of Lake Rudolf. He emerged from the bougainvillea of a lodge wearing a shirt, a pair of khaki shorts and a camera in his hand. Imagine Alberto Sordi in Will Our Heroes Be Able to Find Their Friend Who Has Mysteriously Disappeared in Africa?. Exactly. And after introducing himself, he asked for two pieces of information: where to get a good exchange rate on the black market and whether thirty thousand lire per kilo was an acceptable price for contraband ivory. It seemed like a joke."

"I have always done investigations or written screenplays. In investigations, the facts speak for themselves, while in screenplays, it is the dialogue and the actor's expressions that speak. This time, I wanted to take the reader into the minds of the characters, and you can only do that by writing a novel."

"My commitment will be to bring Greenpeace into national issues. To adapt our global campaigns to the emergencies we have in our territory. So, first and foremost, there will be remediation. Then agriculture, to continue our victories against GMOs and now raise awareness about the pesticides that are exterminating bees. And thirdly, coal. It is unacceptable that it is still one of our primary sources of energy."

"(About the Kidnapping of Aldo Moro) On that day, 16 March 1978, and for several hours afterwards, I believe that our country felt it was facing an insurrection, a civil war, or that a coup d'état might be underway. The gravity of that kidnapping and the level of the attack, directed at the heart of the state, were such that there were fears that there could be an offensive against our democracy. An offensive which, although limited to that event, was real."

"Interviewer: “You also went to Mediaset when Silvio Berlusconi was there.” Formigli: But Forza Italia was in opposition and there was a big issue on the table, the war in Kosovo. Berlusconi was sensitive to the subject, he has never been a warmonger and his latest comments on the conflict in Ukraine prove it. Michele Santoro, with whom I worked, took a critical line. Let's say there was a common sensitivity. Later, when we dealt with other issues and talked about Dell'Utri, the relationship soured and we returned to Rai."

"Alberto is a friend I respect; I don't consider him a competitor. [...] We share the choice to go to places where things have happened, we share the desire to bring a story to life with cinematic writing, we share the fact that we are not looking for television controversy, that we don't have to chase interviews with the politician of the moment. Apart from Ulisse and Atlantide, I don't think there is anything similar on Italian television. His ratings are extraordinary, mine are very good. This means that the audience is there."

"('He was on Michele Santoro's team and suffered the consequences of the Bulgarian edict) That edict changed my life. Looking back today, it was my good fortune, but neither Mauro Masi nor Silvio Berlusconi could have known that. I was 34 years old and held the position of special correspondent for Rai1 and Rai2. I was locked in a small room for a year, doing nothing from morning to night. I tried to move to Tg3, but they prevented me from doing so. I couldn't move; it was a real case of mobbing. In 2003, I moved to Sky, just before mid-August. I had a permanent contract with Rai and I resigned to take a temporary job with the satellite channel. With the programme “Controcorrente”, I learned to present and deal with an editor. I built my own team there and some of those people are still with me today."

"There is still much to discover and report on the behaviour of the Belgian security apparatus, which, since the Charlie Hebdo attack (January 2015), had more than a suspicion to eradicate the jihadist network that subsequently attempted the massacre on the Amsterdam-Paris train (August 2015), carried out the Paris massacre (November 2015) and those in Brussels."

"I like a young person who fights for the environment, even if he is naive and impetuous, and I don't criminalise him. It's always better than staying at home and wasting your time on TikTok. I really like this little finger raised against young people who throw washable paint at monuments. Those who condemn them are the same people who in the 1970s theorised armed struggle and threw Molotov cocktails. Protests are always extreme, but I prefer them to those who don't care. Interviewer': “There must be a middle ground...” Formigli: Middle ground doesn't get you very far. These protests need to be looked at carefully. It bothers me that they are being ridiculed. I have children and I worry about their future. If I were young, I would be as angry as them, if not more so."

"Interviewer: 'Does it still make sense to cry out about the danger of fascism, or does this risk fuelling a narrative that is now outdated? Formigli: It is clear that there is also a problem related to memory. I cannot stand those who are annoyed when the issue of fascism is raised. We have striking examples, starting with a president of the Senate who does not celebrate 25 April and who claimed that those killed in Via Rasella were semi-retired musicians. [...] Not to mention that fascist salutes continue to be used in the lower echelons of Fratelli d'Italia, with someone popping up every now and then. When Meloni openly declares herself to be anti-fascist, I think the controversy will end. But at that point, she will have to expel certain elements from her party."

"I have no preconceptions. I've had representatives of Casa Pound in my studio, I've interviewed David Irving, who said terrible things about the gas chambers. I've never given anything away, I just do my job. [...] Talk shows record what is already there, we are seismographs."

"[The job of presenter and screenwriter] They are the same thing. At Atlantide, I don't improvise anything, it's all written in the script. I have to be convinced of what I say and I have to be careful with my words. I have to be precise."

"I am convinced that the right wing parties has stirred up fears and contributed in recent years to creating a climate of aggression towards foreigners."

"The fundamental mission for talk shows is to overcome laziness. When certain formats work and are successful, we tend to repeat them endlessly. My obsession, on the contrary, is to try to have an unexpected situation or guest. We presenters are marathon runners, we are on video for many weeks. Sometimes there is a temptation to take refuge in a safe construction. And that is a great danger."

"The interviews we see on many programmes only serve to reinforce everyone's convictions, they do not change a single vote and, in my opinion, they are useless."

"I don't think Meloni is a fascist, in fact I rule it out. I don't think the Balilla will return. However, I fear a retreat from democracy and that the authoritarian Polish-Hungarian model will also advance in our country. In 2014, Orban defined Hungary as an illiberal democracy. Does Giorgia Meloni agree? I think there is a problem with fascism in her party, in the lower echelons of the leadership, in the suburbs. It is clear that some of her leaders and part of the electorate are uncomfortable with democracy, and she knows this very well. I would like to ask her if she is aware that there are some nostalgics in Fratelli d'Italia and if she would like to state that she does not want the votes of fascists. I would also like her to remove the flames, as they are a fascist symbol. I claim the right to raise these issues, even though I know you would react very badly."

"[Speaking of Piazzapulita] [...] My problem is not Rete4, but Rai3. I have always looked at Rai3's offering, because there is greater exchange between Rai – and especially the third channel – and La7. Viewers choose based on channel affinity. If a viewer changes channels from Rai3, they switch to us and vice versa. They are more contiguous worlds. That's why it's much more important for me to win the challenge with Rai3. Then, if I manage to capture the audience on Rete4, I'm happy, but I think they are more separate universes."

"I produce reports with the aim of informing voters. Shouldn't we have talked about the Lega, Fratelli d'Italia and the Black Lobby during the election campaign? And when should we have done so? For me, democracy means supporting the fact that a person gives the Roman salute at a public meeting, and it is also democracy that that person is voted for and elected anyway."

"(About Marco Pannella) If only a tenth of the support he received while ill had been there before, Italy would be a better country. Thanks mainly to him, some battles have been won: divorce and abortion above all. Another, that of civil unions, if he had been able to fight it on the front line, would have given us a more courageous law. He leaves before seeing the birth of a truly modern nation, where living wills are the norm, euthanasia is a right, and the legalisation of soft drugs is an obvious and severe response to organised crime. Marco was a great, unbearable fighter who was always on the wrong side. A wrong that was only apparent, as when, in 2003, he asked for Saddam Hussein's life to be spared, whose death fuelled future extremists. Or when, throughout his life, he fought against the indecent and systematic violation of the constitutional principle that prison should re-educate and not just afflict prisoners. Dear Marco, you wanted a secular and libertarian country. You left us too soon, but what you sowed will one day blossom."

"Today, the goal of the Islamic State is our social implosion. Its hope is that the refugee crisis will act as a detonator. The caliph has a compelling logic and a marked propensity for Western self-harm. He supports white supremacy, Donald Trump's toupee, burning suburbs, special laws, prisons in the desert, closed communities, banned mosques and burkinis. In three words: the “clash of civilisations”. Granting him this would be fatal."

"I speak as a father. I believe that children perceive love above all else, regardless of their parents' gender. Of course, in the case of an adopted child, extra care is needed. Parents will have to explain to them in a balanced and careful way what love between two people of the same sex means and their desire to have a child. But I think that a gay couple who want to adopt have already thought long and hard about this."

"I was very close friends with Ilaria's parents, and I discovered, for example, that she conducted her investigations without accompanying the troops, thus rejecting an 'embedded” point of view, and did not sleep with the other Italian journalists because she considered that place to be controlled. This alone gives an idea of the risks she exposed herself to, in addition to being a female journalist in a predominantly male world of correspondents in Somalia in 1994. But it still happens: last year alone, 80 journalists died around the world. When it happens, it almost seems like collateral damage, but it is not, because journalists are unarmed and only seek to tell the truth with their pens and cameras."