Antonio Martino's "zibaldone" between economics and politics collected by Porro

Between a missed interview and an unfinished interview, the extraordinary human and intellectual story of an economist against the tide and a great communicator lent to politics, even if politicians of great depth had been his grandfather and father. This is how the homage can be summarized Nicholas Porro has dedicated to Antonio Martino after his death (“The Eternal Father is liberal - Antonio Martino and the ideas that never die”, Piemme, 208 pp, 18.90).

The missed interview is the one that in 1994, shortly after the inauguration of the first Berlusconi government, the then young journalist thinks he can carry out, when Antonio Martino summons him to the Farnesina. It would be a scoop, it would be the first released by the new foreign minister. Porro rushes, even if he, he says, is not in the best conditions, given that he has been working the small hours for a second job as a discotheque press officer. And instead he is even offered the role of spokesperson. Obviously the two had already crossed paths. Before Antonio, his father, Gaetano Martino, had been Minister of Foreign Affairs, a leader of the Liberal Party who in his city had organized the famous Messina Conference in 1955, which was responsible for the beginning of European integration. And the grandfather, also named Antonio, had been the republican mayor of the reconstruction of Messina after the earthquake.

Someone has reproached the contradiction between Gaetano's Europeanism and Antonio's increasingly marked Euroscepticism, but he himself addresses the issue in one of the jokes delivered to Porro: "You see, if you look formally, my grandfather was on the left about my father, because he was a republican when there was a monarchy; my liberal father had moved to the right, I a liberal. But we haven't moved anywhere. We have always been 100 percent liberal. Except that in my grandfather's time public spending was 10 percent of GDP, in my father's time it was 30 percent, in my time it was 50 percent. If this continues, my nephew Pietro will become a barricade revolutionary! It's the world that has moved to the wrong side of history!”.

Martino had in turn attended the Pli, even though he considered it too statist for his tastes as a liberal trained in Chicago with Milton Friedman. And he had also been nominated for secretary by the internal opposition at the 1988 congress, without being elected. The book contains sharp judgments on that Liberal Party, in which, however, Porro had been in turn. Not only as editor of the party newspaper, but as secretary of the Italian liberal youth of Rome, and elected to the board of directors of Sapienza.

The interview, therefore, is not done. Porro gives first-hand testimony on those eight months, interrupted by Bossi's "turnaround". At that point Porro returned to journalism, eventually becoming deputy director of the newspaper. Martino continued in politics, even as Minister of Defense in crucial years, between 2001 and 2006. But over time he was increasingly marginalized in Forza Italia and also disillusioned with politics, up to the choice not to run again from 2018: the very year in which Porro becomes one of the reference anchormen of Italian screens, with "Quarta Repubblica". However, Martino's "retirement" is an occasion for a deepening of contacts, also because Porro in the meantime has written various books that support "Martinian" points of view. At a certain point, therefore, the idea arose of making an interview book together, which began with a first conversation lasting a few hours in Martino's house on the Cassia. "A few weeks later, without anyone knowing it, he passed away." At 80 years old. “I graduated at 17, graduated at 21, married at 26, had my first professorship at 28, minister and grandfather at 50: I did it all very early. But to die, that's it, I'd like to do it as late as possible”, was a confidence that Martino had given him.

Instead of the long conversation that had been imagined, this book was born, which Porro defines as "a liberal hodgepodge". There are quite a few provocations, starting with the title. There are explanations of the ideas Martino believed in. There is his biography, mixed with that of the interviewer. There are considerations on Italy's problems and on its irreducible statism. And there is, finally, a great confession. Martino says he never wanted to be minister of the economy because he didn't want to be forced to make choices that contradicted what he had always preached. “All the economists, even esteemed and important ones who had made ministers, had seen their credibility crumble”.