It would be too simple to talk about the current mayor of Terni, Stefano Bandecchi, as if he were a strange alien who arrived from a distant planet, Osteria Numero Quattro, in a spaceship perhaps in the form of a cheap 15-litre container. wine. Because the character made immensely popular by those who thought of turning him into a “television face” in order to respond to the irresistible desire for garbage that attacks the average Italian in the evening hours, is nothing more than the epilogue of something that started from afar. .

The recent history of the Umbrian provincial capital, where just over a hundred thousand people were once busy supplying manpower to one of the country’s main industrial centres, may be a metaphor for how the relationship of trust between people and politics is coming to an end. It led to the corruption of institutions, which in many cases led to grotesquery. In Terni, as elsewhere in Italy, the crisis in traditional industry has led to factory closures, layoffs, poverty and, above all, a lot of anger.

The decline of the old red asylum

The city was a fiefdom of the Italian Communist Party from 1944 to 1993. As the workers’ society ended and that party ended, he found himself increasingly poorer and lacking in certainty and identity. In 2018, Leopoldo Di Girolamo, the last center-left mayor to lead the municipality, was forced to resign by the Court of Accounts and the municipality was left in financial ruin. After that, Leonardo Latini, a former MSI who later joined the League, was elected; After a decidedly unexciting first mandate, he was ousted by his own coalition, who opted to nominate an outgoing councilor from his own council.

desperate gesture

At this point, as a desperate gesture, the people of Terni voted for the unscrupulous entrepreneur as president of the football team, after nearly twenty years. Perhaps an instinctive and irrational vote led the city to discredit coverage of the mayor’s programs. Bandecchi, who is also the founder of Niccolò Cusano University, came to the point of fighting in the city council in August, declared in October that Israel was too moderate and “it would be better if it flattened Gaza”, and in November said: While talking about femicides , said that a man should cheat on his girlfriend, otherwise it is not normal and “sooner or later he will kill her”, he was a little quiet in December (perhaps he was busy with Christmas preparations…) and now turning to the issue of gender violence, which is very dear to him “A normal man looks at a woman’s ass and maybe tries it: If he succeeds, he fucks her, otherwise he goes home,” he said. He thundered at council members who walked out in protest: “Take as much as you want, that’s my opinion.”

Scenes that could be seen in a movie by the Vanzina brothers in the 1980s, that might even make you smile, but truly bring sadness in a town hall. In fact, the list could be much longer, because the mayor organizes a kind of talk show on the university television channel he founded; but perhaps it is better to let some performances get lost in the deep folds of digital terrestrial broadcasting, among phone sales of anti-cellulite creams and impromptu fortune tellers. If the policy at Terni had not been so unsuccessful, some things would have been seen only there.