Sangiuliano, Brancaleone comes from Naples

He wanted to look like Benedetto Croce, but he convinced himself that Benedetto Croce looks like him. Since he has been a minister in the Meloni government, he presents himself like this: “Gennaro Sangiuliano, minister of culture like Giovanni Spadolini and Alberto Ronchey”. Soon after: “Former director, writer, journalist, university professor. Thank you”. The worst that can happen in your life, in the summer, is to read the portrait of Sangiuliano, signed by Sangiuliano, which the editors of the newspapers “must publish” to avoid Sangiuliano’s phone calls. When a journalist asks him for an interview, his answer is: “I don’t give interviews, but I write editorials, whose place is on the front page. A box, thank you”. The latest slips, the minister would say misunderstandings, do not fully restore the originality, the complexity of Soccavo’s “federal”, the Brancaleone vien Napoli, with the nose clip, the pince-nez and the photograph of Giuseppe Prezzolini inside the wallet. If you happen to come within range, he will throw you water balloons from Croce-Soffici-Papini-Marinetti-Longanesi. Plaf! Clinically you are doomed. There is a phrase announcing the opening of hostilities: “As you say…”. Every time the reporter with the pen runs into Sangiuliano, armed with a microphone, the reporter suffocates. It is the Sangiuliano gas, nebulous sulphide, molecules given off by the mop that catches him dust. It is library dust, dust from the Sangiuliano Library. They call him Genny, American-style, because he wrote a biography on Reagan, as well as having been the “shoulder” of conservatism, declared it in the Corriere (“I imported Bush’s conservatism into Italy”) and published the fundamental biography on Trump (another declaration) “to whom they will one day award the Nobel Prize”. The prophecies of Sangiulianus. For friends he is affectionately “Genny ‘o miracol(ato)”, “Genny five parties”, “Genny ‘a Croce”, “Genny’ ‘o pavone”, while for former colleagues, the reporters who worked with him on the Opinion of the South (liberal newspaper) Il Roma, L’Indipendente, Libero, and then in Rai, he is only “the intellectual who has written more books than he has been able to read”. If you ask him how many books he owns it is like asking a ten-year-old: “Do you want a new bicycle?”. Never do that.