The president of the MAXXI Foundation Alessandro Giuli is the new Minister of Culture. On Friday afternoon he was sworn in at the Quirinale before the President of the Republic Sergio Mattarella, taking the place of Gennaro Sangiuliano, who had resigned shortly before due to the controversy generated by the Maria Rosaria Boccia case.
Born in Rome in 1975, Giuli has a history of youth militancy in the far right. He inherited his political faith from his father’s family: his paternal grandfather had been a staunch supporter of Benito Mussolini’s regime and the Republic of Salò. At fourteen, Giuli joined the Fronte della Gioventù, the youth organization of the Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI, a party nostalgic for fascism and heir to the Republic of Salò). He also participated in neo-fascist and neo-Nazi movements active in the city. After graduating from high school in classical studies at Liceo Tasso, in 1994, he enrolled in the Faculty of Letters at La Sapienza University, where he mostly took philosophy courses. In those years he developed his passion for pre-Christian paganism and ancient Italic populations, to which he would dedicate studies and research over the years with connections to neo-fascist culture, which during the twentieth century was often inspired by the rituals and imagery of those peoples.
– Read also: The Boccia-Sangiuliano case, from the beginning
In the meantime Giuli began his career as a journalist in the daily newspaper of the centre-left Italian Social Democratic Party, Humanity. During his university years, which he never completed, he began working on Vespinaa press agency founded and directed by the journalist Giorgio Dell’Arti. From there in 2004 he moved to Sheet by Giuliano Ferrara, first as a collaborator, then as a political reporter, until he became deputy director and then co-director of the newspaper between 2015 and 2016. Giuli, however, considered the editorial line of the newspaper to be wrong, which in that period went more to the left supporting the political rise of Matteo Renzi, then secretary of the PD. Having left The Sheetwent to direct the magazine Timesof Catholic and conservative orientation.
Giuli has also had various collaborations with TV programs and newspapers. Between 2020 and 2022 he hosted and edited some programs on Rai 2, none of which were very successful and some were suspended after just a couple of episodes due to lack of ratings. During the first “yellow-green” government led by Giuseppe Conte he got closer to the League, but he has always remained very close to the Roman right-wing circles, and has long been a friend of Giorgia Meloni and various leaders of her party. His sister Antonella Giuli, who was for a long time head of communications for Fratelli d’Italia and then spokesperson for the Minister of Agriculture Francesco Lollobrigida, has been working for a few months in the press office of the Chamber of Deputies.
His name had been circulating with some insistence already in October 2022, as a possible Minister of Culture in Meloni’s government. Instead, a month later, the Minister of Culture Gennaro Sangiuliano appointed him president of the MAXXI foundation, which manages the museum of contemporary art in Rome and which until then had always been controlled by people from the progressive area. In recent times, without ever denying his past and his youthful militancy, Giuli has attempted to represent a more moderate and institutional approach to the right, preaching the need to abandon the more radical sovereignist and anti-establishment demands that characterize the propaganda of Fratelli d’Italia. He is married to Valeria Falcioni, a journalist for Sky, with whom he has two children.
Related News :