Abodi: “Me, Vialli and the unwanted guest: one day I touched my neck, now I’ve lost it”

Think further and act fast. It is the book lying on the yellow sofa in the minister’s office Andrea Abodi. The volume talks about innovation and young people, even if the title seems to enclose the personal story of this 62-year-old manager who one day, in January 2021, touched his neck. “And I felt two glands, two lymph nodes, hurting me. They had grown bigger. Giorgia Meloni a couple of months earlier he had proposed me as a candidate for mayor of Rome for the centre-right. A biopsy will follow, the discovery of the primary tumor cell in the tonsillar wall. So one cycle of chemo and one of radium. After the cycle of treatments, they were still there. Pet said so. Nothing to do: I had to operate. It was August 3, 2021. In the meantime, I had explained to Giorgia that I could not stand as a candidate in the Campidoglio, despite the fact that she had waited for me as long as possible, blocking in a certain way the other candidacies of the administrative ones in Milan, Turin, Bologna. I couldn’t speak for a while.” Andrea Abodi is the minister of sport and youth policies. He manages to meet Il Foglio on a hectic Friday morning. Appointment at eight. In another room, the trade unions await him for a meeting, while at 1 pm a plane to Paris awaits him. Meeting with the French counterpart who deals with young people. How are you, Minister? “I believe and hope well. I think I lost the unwanted guest. Of course, when they remove your lymph node chain you are asymmetrical, it seems that you are missing something”.