Sangiuliano rejoices: “300,000 visitors to my exhibition!”. But they are Uffizi tickets

Tireless and talkative, the Minister of Culture, Gennaro Sangiuliano, known as Genny, had come up with an exhibition in June at the Uffizi. An exhibition dedicated to magazines of the early twentieth century. Then, last Sunday, after a month, he proclaimed his success. And without being too impressed by his own skill, he declared: “The exhibition we inaugurated last June 15 together with the president of the Senate Ignazio La Russa, surpasses the milestone of three hundred thousand visitors”. Three hundred thousand, damn it. Almost as much as visitors to the Hermitage in St. Petersburg. Just a little less than those of the New York Museum of Natural History. And in fact, continued Sangiuliano while already popping a button on his waistcoat now unable to contain his glorious chest: “This success with the public in just a month proves that we were right”. How to doubt it? “For this reason”, concluded this man whom Providence has not sent us, but envies us: “We have decided to extend the exhibition until January 7, 2024”. Now, leaving aside for a moment the fact that the sympathetic minister always speaks of himself in the third person like Julius Caesar in De bello Gallico (Cesar too, like Sangiuliano, was on the other hand inclined towards autobiography: we inaugurated it, we were right, we decided) we cannot fail to underline that everything is beautiful, everything is legitimate, everything is fantastic, except that it is also all false. In fact, no one paid for the ticket for the Sangiuliano exhibition (an exhibition which, on the other hand, did not have tickets). And those three hundred thousand visitors – a number that rivals the major museums in the world – are actually the visitors who paid in the last month in Florence to see Botticelli, Titian, Michelangelo and Raphael at the Uffizi. Then, with that ticket, if one really wanted, let’s say if he really had the courage, after Leonardo, Giotto and Michelangelo Merisi known as Caravaggio, he could also enter to see the exhibition of Gennaro Sangiuliano known as Genny. Why this minister wanted to push his dissipation to the point of inventing an unverifiable public success for his exhibition will probably remain a mystery. To us, knowing him, the suspicion remains that he is more of a record and a mimeograph than a minister, in short, he is never touched by the suspicion that before speaking (or writing) it would perhaps be appropriate to think.