«Behind Bonaccini and Schlein, the usual establishment. With you? He wants to destroy us »-Corriere.it

Cuperlo, you are doomed to defeat.
“No, but this time the house is on fire, and there are battles worth fighting.”

The Ultimate Romantic.
«Let’s say idealistic. Naive, perhaps.”

Cuperlo what’s his name?
«Maybe Hungarian: it would be written with a K. But I don’t have a large family tree. My ancestors are all from Trieste, except for a grandfather from Romagna».

What did his parents do?
«My father employed in an import-export company, my mother a housewife. Yet they managed to take my brother and me to eat fish in Muggia once a month, and in August to walk for ten days in the Dolomites. Today a family like mine at the time could not afford it».

It was the Italy of the economic miracle.
«That he had hard work behind him, sometimes hunger. Grandpa Vittorio Cuperlo was a typographer, I remember him with ink on his fingers, by now it never came off. His other grandfather, Aeneas, died young. Her daughter Adriana, my mother’s sister, had to emigrate: the route to the Americas was closed; so in 1957 she, just married, she left by steamer for Australia. Melbourne”.

Have you ever met Aunt Adriana?
«Only once, when he returned to visit Trieste. I accompanied her husband, Uncle Mario, around the city, and I experienced the euphoria and agony of the immigrant, who struggles to recognize his city so changed, and at the same time he brought it with him. In Australia, people from Trieste met each other, spoke in dialect, cooked their food, listened to their songs… Even now, every time my daughter Sara comes to Trieste, she is surprised: even the pharmacists speak to her in dialect».

Literary city, from Joyce to Magris.
“Since adolescence I have made it a point to read theUlysses; I never went beyond page 80. The friendship between Joyce and Svevo has always fascinated me. Do you know how they met?”

No.
«Joyce went to Svevo’s villa, or rather to his wife’s, to give him English lessons. He made him read his first novels, A life And Senility, panned by critics. Joyce returned after a week and said to him, obviously in Triestine dialect: “The critics don’t understand anything, you are a great writer”. So Svevo gave us Zeno’s conscience».

When did you first see D’Alema?
«In his office on the second floor of Botteghe Oscure: he head of the secretariat of Occhetto, I of the FGCI, the Communist Youth Federation. He looked up and asked me curtly: how many books do you read a month?”.

And she?
«It is the classic question that puts you in difficulty. In fact, I didn’t answer.”

You Cuperlo how many books do you read a month?
“Five or six. Almost just non-fiction.”

Novels right?
“Less. But I spent the lockdown rereading The Karamazov brothers
and to watch the Rai drama. Corrado Pani, whom I had seen as a child at the Rossetti in Trieste, is an extraordinary Dmitry».

Why did you choose D’Alema and not Veltroni?
«I have always appreciated the way in which Veltroni modernized our communication, and the various ways in which he now continues to do politics. But it seemed to me that a more solid party could be born around D’Alema».

Someone has compared D’Alema’s parable to that of Rimbaud in Vecchioni’s song: «And wanting to get hurt to the point of ending him up as an arms dealer…».
“Stop while you’re suing us.”

Seriously: at Palazzo Chigi you were one of the Lothars, as Maria Laura Rodotà called them. The only one with hair. The others were Minniti, Velardi, Rondolino, La Torre.
“I wasn’t a Lothar, and not just because of my hair; so much so that at the beginning of the D’Alema government I remained in the party, I worked in Chigi only for the last six months. Their mistake was to replace the party with the charismatic leader; it is no coincidence that all my friends you mentioned were fascinated by Renzi. It ended badly then, with 11-4 at the 2000 Regionals; and Renzi also ended badly ».

With Renzi you were president of the Democratic Party.
“For 32 days. I took the floor in the management to contest the agreement with Berlusconi on the electoral law, the infamous Italicum. Renzi dismissed me in a contemptuous way: this speaks who was nominated in Parliament. I resigned. My daughter sent me a WhatsApp: “In 32 days no one could have done better”. She was right to make fun of me, and I was wrong.”

Why?
«There is no need to be touchy, especially since I continued the battle from within the management team. In any case, I never left the party».

D’Alema, Bersani, Speranza yes.
“And now they’re back. I was convinced they were wrong. They thought that the Democratic Party with Renzi had irreversibly lost its soul. It wasn’t true.”

Now you are back in Parliament.
“After four years of layoffs, at the beginning at zero hours”.

How did it go?
“When the mandate expired in 2018, the treasurer…”.

Bonifazi.
«The treasurer told me, without malice, that for my own good I would not receive the salary of a party official, even if I continued to work. Which I gladly did, aware that there were many layoffs worse off than me.

What do you think of Meloni?
«A more equipped leader than Salvini. But hers is not the right of liberalizations, or Berlusconi’s conflict of interest, or the Northern League’s sweatshirts. It is a tough, structured right. It’s not folklore; it is an implant, an ideology. To beat it culturally we will have to mobilize all our resources and do it in society”.

Do you seriously believe in authoritarian risk?
«I believe in the risk indicated by Dossetti: every authoritarian government begins with an injection of fear to which an antidote is offered, but in exchange for a share of freedom».

For example?
“For example, this government treats poverty as a sin to be expiated, as in Dickens’ times, when the poor by law had to accept a job at any wage, otherwise they would end up in a hospice”.

Is Conte better equipped than you to oppose?
«More than Meloni, Conte seems to want to destroy the Democratic Party. Just like Renzi. I’m also in this congress to help prevent it.”

And Calenda?
“I like him. But in Heart filmed by his grandfather, more than the part of Enrico Bottini, he would have liked that of Franti».

Why are you running for leader now? Isn’t the idealist Cuperlo an ambitious man after all?
“If I were, I would have accepted the ministerial post that was offered to me, and twice.”

In which governments?
«The first time in the Gentiloni government; but I had voted yes in the referendum, and I didn’t want to be accused of high treason. The second in the Conte bis; but I was not convinced by the operation, carried out without even consulting our members».

Why is his run impossible now for the secretariat of the Democratic Party?
«Umberto Saba wrote a letter to Scipio Slataper to ask him what was left for the poets to do; his answer was: an honest poem. The same goes for us. We still have to make an honest policy. Which doesn’t just mean not stealing, but showing that you’re willing to take risks.”

Why is Bonaccini not good?
«He is a friend and I respect him, but behind him as well as behind Elly I see all the usual and immovable sheltering establishment, the one who has been through every storm without ever getting wet. And then I don’t believe in the party of administrators alone. The double mandate, as the Zingaretti case has shown, does not work. Above all, we must involve the administered. The Democratic Party must be re-founded and open to movements, to society”.

And the other?
«Those who are convinced that only popular participation can change us. It is the trend in which I recognize myself. That of Gobetti, Gramsci, Sturzo».

Did Berlinguer ever know him?
«I saw him when Commander Carlos came to Trieste for the funeral of Vittorio Vidali. I remember him at the federation bar having a coffee with Rafael Alberti, the poet, who had met Vidali in the Spanish war».

Do you come back to Trieste every now and then?
“To see my mother. After my father’s death he wanted to go and live in an Rsa, in 2019. Covid was a terrible experience. For a long time I could not see her. Then they harnessed me like a diver, I found her in front of me in a wheelchair, behind a plastic partition, on which we put the palm of our hand to greet each other, like prisoners… The whole RSA system should be rethought. All public health needs to be saved. Don’t you think that’s another good reason to run?”