From Ferragnez to Ilary Blasi, from Flavio Briatore to Tiziano Ferro, passing through Andrea Giambruno, Sabrina Ferilli, Loredana Berté, Gerard Depardieu, Anna Falchi, Geolier, Simona Ventura and Antonio Terzi, Francesca Fagnani, to name a few. 360 degree gossip, the Italy of VIPs between misery and nobility, pharaonic parties and great suns, are at the center of “Tentazione & Punighi”, the new book by journalist Roberto Alessi, director of Novella 2000, in bookstores by Morellini editore (page 203, 18 euros). ‘Gossip is the first form of democracy’ – reads the subtitle – and this is precisely the motto to which Alessi remains faithful in telling ‘the lives of others’, with the lightness of tolerance, because “only those who have never sinned can cast the first stone.”
Page after page, we discover anecdotes and stories of famous people, everything that has never been known about the names that have filled the newspaper and television news of the last twenty years. Will anyone get angry? “Maybe”, replies Alessi, reminding them that “as long as you are remembered by the gossip columns it will mean that you are still on the merry-go-round. When you are no longer there it will be terrible: as Vittorio Gassman remembered you will have to start working”. And in the preface he underlines how the “I don’t see, I don’t speak, I don’t hear” of the three little monkeys has “always been among us, close to power, in newspapers, in the workplace. Cowards, they hide, smoothing those who could help them in life, and they pretend not to see, as the English royals say, ‘an elephant in the room’, so as not to betray their false affection towards the famous person of the moment. We Italians – claims the author – are more direct and we say ‘The king is naked!’, addressed to those who do not see the obvious truth in absolute flattery towards those who matter most, but ready to be lashing with those who do not have power.”
“Remember Hans Christian Andersen’s ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes?’” asks Alessi. “It’s about a king who, for fear of being thought of as an idiot, had lazy weavers make him a dress with such a fine fabric that it remained transparent to the eyes of stupid people, remaining unequivocally naked in front of his people who were as embarrassed as they were amused. That fabric – claims the author of ‘Tentations & Punishments’ – it is gossip, not surprisingly the first form of democracy, which knows how to betray falsehood and punish arrogance – he concludes – proves him right every day”.
