The first meeting?
«More than a meeting, a photographic flash. In the early nineties, in Florence, I saw Sartori whizzing by on a bicycle. For just a fleeting glance, I turned around but nothing, he had already disappeared into the alleys of the city.”
And how did you meet again?
«I was invited to a party, he was the guest of honor. I recognized him and, struck by a panic attack, I took refuge on a terrace, peeking inside every now and then. The landlady, the Marquise Geddes da Filicaia, invited me several times to enter the living room because she wanted to introduce him to me but I, paralyzed by shyness, resisted going outside.”
And then?
«I had to interview Philippe Daverio, who was in Florence to collect an award. I arrived late, it was raining cats and dogs. I entered the room where the conference was taking place and I realized that Sartori was speaking. I sat in one of the last rows, stunned.”
And Daverio?
«I asked him to introduce me to the professor and so he did. Vanni and I found ourselves talking on the terrace of the Bardini museum, under my huge umbrella and in the rain. We exchanged telephone numbers.”
Vanni is Giovanni Sartoriwho in the twentieth century was one of the most famous Italian political scientists in the world, born exactly one hundred years ago and passed away in 2017, for years one of the leading editorialists of the Corriere della Sera. His wife, the artist, tells it Isabella Gherardisubmerged by a gigantic archive of memories that she is putting in order in their Roman home.
There was a big age difference between her and Sartori.
«He was a man who exuded immense charisma. A mix of extraordinary expressive simplicity, enormous culture and an incredible sense of humor. The fateful meeting occurred in New York, in his home on the twenty-seventh floor of the Century Building on Central Park West. One rainy evening, he and I found ourselves sharing a can of tomato soup and an apple, the only edible things in his kitchen.”
What was he like?
«Vanni was a man of great vigor, he had a past as a sportsman, a great skier and lover of the sea, of fishing without tanks and of sailing. Just think, he told me about a cruise to the Balearics on the boat of his childhood friend Emilio Pucci, during which he saved Margaret of England by diving; the princess had inadvertently fallen into the water, perhaps due to an excessive dose of morning whiskey . But in his youth Vanni had had the most unthinkable encounters, for example Jaqueline Kennedy.”
On what occasion?
«Vanni frequented Marlia’s villa in Lucca, then owned by Pecci Blunt. Jacqueline Kennedy, recently widowed, was walking alone in the gardens of the villa and Vanni suddenly found her in front of him; to break the ice he came up with the phrase pronounced by the journalist Stanley on Lake Tanganyika, when he had found the explorer who had been missing for years: “Doctor Livingstone, I presume”. Kennedy evidently hadn’t grasped the irony and had moved on, almost running away.”
What kind of childhood did Sartori have?
«His mother Emilia, known as Titina, was of Belgian origin. His father Dante was the heir to an important woolen mill that his grandfather had founded in Schio, in Veneto, and then transferred to Stia. Two opposite characters: her father was concrete and shy, while Titina, a beautiful and elegant woman, was worldly, a friend of Montanelli, Colette Roselli and Lord Acton. Vanni soon learned three languages in addition to Italian and this knowledge was crucial to his studies and career. He only spoke to me in French when he was angry so the waitress wouldn’t understand.”
Golden childhood, in short.
«Let’s say yes. His friends were Spadolini and the young aristocrats of Florence who found themselves in Versilia in the summer and who would remain his lifelong friends. From Giulia Maria Crespi to Marella Caracciolo. Although the destruction of his father’s factory by the Germans in 1944 changed many things. His father later also became interested in cinema, as a producer and financed Fellini’s The White Sheik.”
Did you also know the lawyer Agnelli?
“Yes. But Vanni told me that she didn’t like one side of Gianni’s character, that of having a sort of limited attention span; she listened to you for those five minutes in which you aroused her interest, then suddenly changed the subject. The lawyer, who was a friend of hers from her youth, did not forgive this. When the same thing happened to him with Berlusconi, let’s say, she didn’t care much.”
Sartori’s editorials on Berlusconi were without discounts, without restraints.
«Gianni Letta invited him to a lunch to introduce him to him. Berlusconi, having just become Prime Minister, evidently wanted to ensnare him. When he realized that it wasn’t the case, the Knight stopped listening to him and began to think about his affairs. But look at this (Gherardi takes a black and white photo, ed). Do you recognize them?”.
Honestly no.
«It is a photo of a conference organized by Raymond Aron in 1959 on the topic of the Cold War. They were near Basel, only a few speakers. (Points to two people, ed) This is Sartori, this one is Oppenheimer.”
The father of Italian political science and the father of the atomic bomb.
«He arrived at political science via philosophy, due to an extraordinary accident. In 1950, the dean of the Faculty of Political Sciences in Florence, Giuseppe Maranini, had offered the chair to one of his prodigious twenty-five-year-old protégés, Giovanni Spadolini; Pompeo Biondi, in order not to be left behind, had deployed Sartori in the academic field, who surprisingly would find himself professor of History of Philosophy.”
But what was the accident?
«On 8 September 1943, the surrender of Badoglio. Being born in ’24, Vanni should have been recruited at the beginning of that year. But the call to arms came late, late autumn. Like many of his peers he tried to save himself by deserting. Two of his friends were discovered and shot. He hid first in the countryside, then in Florence in an uncle’s house where there was a library well stocked with philosophical books and, to amuse himself, he started reading Hegel, Croce and Gentile.”
In America her husband was a celebrity.
«The first time he was there after the war for a period of studies. Then Stanford, the best political science faculty in America, where they offered him the Gabriel Almond professorship; and finally, for almost twenty years, until 1994, at Columbia in New York.”
The American acquaintances?
«Henry Kissinger but also the presidents who, from time to time, received him at the White House. Vanni said of Jimmy Carter that he was a boring man; of her spouses Reagan instead remembered how Nancy’s passion for palmistry greatly influenced her husband Ronald’s political choices, which often depended on the opinion of her magicians consulted by her wife. He greatly respected Bush senior, whom he knew as vice president, because he said that he had a perfect knowledge of the economic and military machine of the USA.”
Why was he called back to the University of Florence at the end of the 1960s?
«Because the principal at the time couldn’t keep the protest at bay. Cold winter, faculty occupied for months, Sartori discovered that inside the students were essentially busy with two activities: making long intercontinental phone calls in China to their Maoist comrades and practicing free love in the heat. So, to stop the occupation, as principal he imposed two choices: first he had the telephone lines disconnected, then the radiators. The occupation ended.”
Were you not afraid for your safety?
“I do not believe. She rode around on a bicycle that the caretaker called “the presidential one”. When they went to ask for him, he replied “let me check if the presidential car is parked there”. The visitors were thinking of who knows what armored car; then they saw that it was a very simple bike.”
Parlor?
«Enough. But she had refused, for example, to receive Imelda Marcos at her home in New York. Once, during one of these evenings, an important film critic whose name I don’t remember, figuratively evoking the election of Barack Obama to the White House, asked him what he thought of the “cappuccino in the White House”.
And he?
«He replied that he had been to the White House many times but that they had never offered him a cappuccino. In any case, he didn’t have much respect for Obama.”
Why?
«Because he didn’t take his class at Columbia. For Vanni it was unthinkable that a future president of the United States of America, having had the opportunity, would have decided not to learn the fundamentals of democracy.”
Parties and Party Systems, in 1976, had given him worldwide academic notoriety.
«Then something happened in New York that he experienced as a tragedy. He put Letter 22 and the proofs of the next book, which was almost completed, in a bag with the aim of going out of town to work for a few days. He took the car from the garage, stopped, got out again and went back into the house because he had forgotten I don’t know what, asking the doorman to check the car. When he returned to the ground floor, after a few minutes, the car was there but the bag was gone. And with it the new book, lost forever.”
Sartori died on 3 April 2017 but the news was given three days later, after the funeral had taken place. Why?
«He had decided so. He didn’t want a public funeral, he didn’t want celebrations, he didn’t want crocodile tears. What marked him in this sense was a funeral he had attended a year earlier.”
Whose funeral?
«By Umberto Eco».
