Tearing up on national TV, the Italian culture minister admitted it: Yes, he’d had an affair with a fashion entrepreneur two decades his junior.
Years after the tawdry tales of bunga bunga parties under Silvio Berlusconi, a new sex scandal has hit the country – and has now forced the minister to resign.
Italians can’t get enough of it.
The scandal has come with that tearful TV interview, a steady flow of Instagram posts and even secret footage taken in parliament with Ray-Ban smart glasses.
The married minister, 62-year-old Gennaro Sangiuliano, said he had broken off the affair in the summer.
But he faced days of pressure and even ridicule, with one commentator remarking he had behaved more like a Love Island contestant than the person in charge of one of the world’s greatest cultural heritages.
On Friday he handed in his resignation, saying the job of culture minister “cannot be stained or stopped by gossip” and vowing to take legal action against those who had spread “fake news”.
The minister, an ally of Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, insisted he had acted “with transparency and fairness”.
The lover, 41-year-old Maria Rosaria Boccia, has either been dismissed as a scorned woman seeking revenge, or held up as an unlikely feminist standing up to a powerful man who cast her aside.
Italy has been lapping it up.
This is by no means the first sex scandal to make headlines in the country: Italians famously elected a porn-star to parliament and spent years gossiping over the late former prime minister Berlusconi’s parties with young women.
How it started
Maria Rosaria Boccia’s Instagram account has 105,000 followers: Pic: Instagram
The scandal broke out with an Instagram post by Ms Boccia, thanking Mr Sangiuliano for naming her to a consultancy role in the ministry. Her title: “adviser to the minister for major events”.
The culture ministry denied the appointment – and questions over her role, relationship with the minister and access to confidential information quickly mounted.
Ms Boccia seemed to have an answer to it all – she provided screenshots of emails and started a steady trickle of social media posts featuring pictures of events she had attended with the minister, which showed she had access to public offices and documents.
Those trips included a visit to the Pompeii archaeological site where G7 culture ministers will gather this month.
Eventually the minister appeared on the prime-time news show on the state broadcaster to address the questions – and admit the affair.
“The first person I have to apologise to is an exceptional person, my wife,” he said, his voice breaking.
“Then I apologise to Giorgia Meloni, who trusted me, for embarrassing her and the government.”
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Gennaro Sangiuliano and his wife Federica Corsini at the Venice Film Festival last month. Pic: Reuters
But he maintained he had done nothing wrong in his public duties – insisting no public money had been spent on his trips with her and no role had been granted as a result of the relationship.
He said that while he had considered employing Ms Boccia as an unpaid consultant for the ministry, he then changed his mind as it could potentially be a “conflict of interest”.
The resignation is the first ministerial change in Ms Meloni’s otherwise solid right-wing government, and it does not pose an immediate threat to its overall stability.
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Coldplay concert
Ms Boccia had a different story.
She said trips where she accompanied the minister around Italy were part of her yet-to-be-formalised consultancy job and were paid for by the ministry.
She hinted at “spicy” messages in her phone chats with him.
While he said the ministry’s chauffeured car had only been used on public duty, she said it once took them to a Coldplay concert.
Gennaro Sangiuliano with Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni during the swearing-in ceremony in 2022. Pic: Reuters
Ms Boccia has come under fire for recording conversations without consent and for shooting video with her Ray-Bans inside parliament, where it’s illegal to film without permission.
She claimed she was just testing her new gadget, and said everybody does it when visiting the building.
Some have accused her of scheming to hurt the government, citing the recordings of private conversations. She said she was just protecting herself in the face of a powerful man.
In a video interview with newspaper La Stampa, she said it all started in mid-July after “the minister told me something that struck me a lot.
“He said: ‘I’m the minister, I’m a man, I represent the institutions and in the future no one will believe anything you say’.”