Marco Travaglio
Montanelli e il Cavaliere

Despite the critique from detractors and informers, Indro Montanelli can officially be counted among the eternal illustrious figures of Italian culture, a father of journalism that's "uncomfortable" for some and incredibly appealing for today's future paper, pen, iPhone & tablet users, a Master of rhetoric and eloquence entirely alien from the conformist tradition of the beautiful country. Lynched and reviled for pure hobby due to his not-so-strong ties with the Fasces of Ethiopia and Latium Agro, accused without dignity of friendships, adventures, and youthful entanglements having the common denominator of batons and castor oil, the man from Fucecchio never denied having been on the side of the Littorio for a modest period of time, clarifying that he earned a fine expulsion from the Journalists' Register for his resistance against Mussolinism, as well as a death sentence averted through the intercession of the then Cardinal of Milan Ildefonso.

Montanelli's philosophy, rooted in the Risorgimento and post-Risorgimento commitment, is imbued with liberalism that is at times utopian and fanciful, an advocate of a right-wing conservatism detached from both totalitarian authoritarianism and the communist threat, a threat he staunchly opposed even to the point of being shot in the legs by extremists who weren't satisfied with following the crowd of slanderers and rabble-rousers. Having been a faithful passenger for years on the royal train of the "Corriere della Sera", Montanelli left Via Solferino when the left-leaning and pro-communist veil began to seriously threaten the dominant ideology of the Milanese paper. It was the not too carefree years of "Plug our noses and vote DC" that led him to create the firstborn of his two editorial ventures, "Il Giornale". Born as an elegant paper salon midway between the omnibus and the opinion daily, "Il Giornale" boldly mixed news, criticism, and disengagement of the elzevirs, a sort of little treat for advertisers, readers of "a bit of everything", old liberal intellectuals from the Café, and even some "radical chic" who were a bit less picky. A salon that soon ended up in the hands of the archetypal majority shareholder, Silvio Berlusconi: having ended his career as a minstrel and singer on cruise ships, the future Emperor of the fashionable and extravagant Milanese belt dove headfirst into real estate entrepreneurship, shaping the headquarters of Milan 2. From trowel to television business was a rapid leap, and by the late Seventies, Berlusconi began hoarding networks to form the harem of TeleMilano/Canale 5. Montanelli's "Il Giornale", soon bereft of publishers and brave souls ready to invest in the project, was sold "for a handful of change" to the patron of Arcore, happy to add a few useful sheets of paper to his TV frequencies. Despite the ever-hovering specters and skeletons in Silvio's closet (affiliation with the Masonic Lodge P2 led by Licio Gelli, alleged collusions with the Sicilian Mafia, legacies of court "stables" like Mangano and Dell'Utri, a downpour of money of dubious origins...), the idyll between Montanelli and his publisher-savior began and continued in the most favorable manner possible, at least until the Eighties-Nineties transition. And it's here that Marco Travaglio's monumental biography begins, one of the illustrious from the Montanellian school, who, little more than a twenty-year-old, left his native Turin to stand before the Master and followed him unceasingly into the last phase of his corporeal and spiritual life. A phase he wanted to narrate.

It was precisely the increasingly evident signs of the fall of the First Republic that shattered the Tuscany-Lombardy link. Torn apart by the pressing rise of Umberto Bossi's Lumbards, distrusted by the electorate, in the throes of palace and basement intrigues, wounded by the bloody attacks of the anti-system battalion (notably the Mafia and Br), the party-oligarchy was coming to an end: the sacred triptych of Dc-Pci-Psi not only needed additional courtiers to safeguard the seats of Palazzo Chigi, Montecitorio, and Palazzo Madama (pentaparties, governments of national solidarity, etc.), but had even joined forces in a cycle of clandestinity and illegality that culminated in the Tangentopoli investigation. In the midst of such dynamics, Berlusconi and his empire/wagon could but insinuate themselves. Pursued by judges and nascent pools eager to investigate the real origins of the waterfalls of money invested in brick and the occupation of the ether, Silvio definitively established his "entry into the field", halfway between football and the basest political populism, and summoned his loyalists: no one could back out. Not even Montanelli.

The man from Fucecchio not only politely declined the heartfelt invitation to act as a promoter for the publisher's election campaign, but even went as far as to strike at his closest friends, firstly the pseudo-socialist Bettino Craxi, mentor of Forza Italia's climb to success. Thus began an exhausting battle between Berlusconi and Montanelli through mobbing, pressing, and threats: while celebrities of the caliber of Emilio Fede and Vittorio Sgarbi from the future Premier's "press office" demanded the handover of the "Giornale" chair to a purist of Fininvest ideology, the same Berlusconi burst (without notifying the founder) into the journalist assembly, announcing their official enlistment into the Forza army. That was the straw that broke the camel's back: Montanelli ceded the creature he had founded twenty years earlier to Vittorio Feltri.

Deprived of His "Giornale", the Master conceived the second and final editorial production of his life. "La Voce", a refined example of alternative press, was born from the courage of some entrepreneurs and personalities such as Vittorio Corona, and just a few months after the expulsion from Via Negri, it was already challenging the figures of the Italian printing press. Briefly, however, as only a year later, in 1995, Montanelli's salon closed its doors, suffocated by market rules and the underhanded and overt counterattack of opponents. At 86 years old, with another pile of beautiful paper seized by Italian ignominy, Montanelli returned to Corriere, where he nestled sweetly in his "Room" until his death in 2001, the year in which his former publisher, on political pause (or rather in opposition) from 1995 to 2000, returned to power.

A rich, detailed, vivid, enthusiastic biography of a man criticized from both sides, a true professor of Italian linguistic-literary culture. A man capable of moving from the aulic austerity of "announcing" to the satirical foreigner-inclined of "radical chic" or to the perhaps too forceful yet terribly clear eloquence of "plug our noses". A man who dreamed of the freedom of debate, the content-richness of public opinion, the defeat of Authority and market Censorship. A utopian, yet always the Dean of Journalism. That of another Italy, equally imaginary. Indeed, the Real has never had the honor of possessing him.