Giulio Andreotti was a pragmatic man. For this reason, he excelled in aspects of everyday life, the Sunday passions of the common people, such as cinema, sport, football. When, a year and a half after his appointment (31 May, 1947, IV De Gasperi Cabinet) as government supervisor of cinematographic matters, he was brought to review The Glory of the Sport, a Rank production on the London Olympics of 1948, he was angered by how the victors depicted the vanquished, the Italians. In the inaugural parade that opens the celebratory film, even Malta has been included, that cursed rock, which thanks to the radar Marconi invented, had downed 90% of our aeroplanes (the aquilotti of Mattòli and Sordi) and torpedoed our ships (“once they arrived in Africa alive, dying was more difficult”, remembers Monicelli). Andreotti, therefore, for reasons of public order temporarily suspends screenings of the Rank film, but not to have the Maltese or Pakistani cut, rather he has a few more medals added for the Italians, which were in any case plentiful: we had come third.
He understands that more than the readmission of Triestina into Serie A, more than the nationalisation of sports betting, Sisal becomes Totocalcio (the elusive twelve), holding the Olympic Games represents a great opportunity. It will take him twelve years to bring De Coubertin’s five Olympic Rings to Rome, “the glory of sport”. He organises conferences, demolishes slum housing, builds roads, ice rinks, trampolines, velodromes, athletes’ villages.
Andreotti mixes these projects with Felliniani dreams, trips and jaunts. He meets with Ferraniacolor and Reza Pahlavi, disciplines the war brides and the fire-fighters of Viggiù. He talks of Chaplin, De Sica, Rossellini, Visconti and Fabrizi. Guess which of these giants really got on the thirty year-old Undersecretary’s nerves, humili genere natus? The theatre and Ghiringhelli, the Undersecretary doesn’t give any importance to. He sent De Pirro, he signed the paperwork, he provided the subsidies. If he could have, even De Pirro wouldn’t have gone. And furthermore, Silvana Pampanini, Wilma Montesi and Salvatore Giuliano, the project that Andreotti advised against. Because he, the son of poor parents, respected capital: he didn’t wait to punish them later, he dissuaded them from the very start.
Speaking of the ‘Montesi Affair’, or of how Andreotti learnt to be on guard and fabricate the archives, at the centre of it lie an air conditioner and a photograph that cannot be found, but we have kept it in all the same. The first film ended with a twist, the second with a play on words – youth and the shadow of death.
Instead, if you want an aphorism, here it is: “Quo Vadis? did more for Italy than the Marshall Plan”.