Only for the Upper Classes: G7 Pompei Event with New and Old Personnel, but Still High Costs (13 Million Euros)
Fratelli d’Italia (FdI) plate dried fruit, Marinella ties and silences. In Naples the curtain rises on the most rambling, mouthy and politically slippery G7 in recent history. Among the guests there is also the “king of silk ties”, Maurizio Marinella, who goes there with one eye on the sky, with Berlusconi who – probably – is laughing with relish: Say what you will, between ties around ministers' necks and buildings shaking for a blonde, it is still my G7.
Marinella has a devil for a hair. As on other occasions, he has undertaken to supply the Presidency of the Council with one hundred customised ties free of charge with the event logo (an olive tree hair in the sea) and the same number of scarves, but the atelier says that the sudden change of ministers due to the “Boccia-Sangiuliano scandal” has also caused chaos in communications with Palazzo Chigi: They have had a nice communiqué ready since the morning but no OK to send it out, nor clear instructions on how to deliver the goods. "Marinella and the G7 a love story that began way back in 1994 when Silvio Berlusconi was president”, they say from the historic boutique on the Riviera di Chiaia while waiting for authorisation from Rome.
She, Maria Rosaria Boccia, the minister's unsuccessful advisor (and lover?), is there to spoil the party, distilling pebbles via social media: “Then there is another issue to discuss. All the G7 Culture participants will receive gifts, who selected the companies? Who selected the gifts? It is useless to bring out the “rag” that they signed up for the site. The decision lies with the Presidency of the Council and the Ministry of Culture, by what criteria were the companies chosen?”
Certainly behind the Italian Presidency of the G7 there is a lot of money, about 100 million, but little information. Movements, reception, gift catering for those in Naples are decided in an anonymous clinker and glass building in the eastern suburbs of Milan. These are the offices of a fast-growing agency, Ab Comunicazioni, whose institutional clients include the Prime Minister's Office (it has organised the 2021 G20 in Venice), Enit and Trenitalia and various regions including Campania.
On the stages it sets up, Meloni, Santanché, Salvini, La Russa and Toti take turns. It has just won the 4 million euro tender for the Ministry of Infrastructure's new road safety campaign. For Enit, it looks after exhibition stand fittings. For Trenitalia, the Christmas “2023 Frecciarossa campaign”.
Knocking, however, is pointless: “Due to contractual constraints, we cannot give information on the organisation or any other details of the G7”, replies the agency's owner Andrea Bertoletti, who refers the matter to the Ministry of Culture, where, however, no one speaks any more.
The agency arrives in Pompeii by participating in the Consip tender called by the Prime Minister's Office last year and closed in April for all the events and “technical/political” services connected with the € 27.900 million Italian G7 Presidency year. Nineteen operators are bidding. There is a first lot of 11 million for the summits of heads of state and government, and a second one for ministerial-only events, such as the G7 Culture in Pompeii for 13 million.
Every initiative now becomes suspect. Antonio Del Giudice, FdI's former mayor of Striano, lost the elections in June and was convicted of stealing bikes from immigrants (“they stink”). Del Giudice is very close to both Minister Lollobrigida and the Honourable Michele Schiano di Visconti, Fratelli d'Italia coordinator for the metropolitan city of Naples. For five generations, his family has had a dried fruit and various canned goods business in Striano and his dried fruit will end up in the G7 Agricoltura in Ortigia (26th -28 th September), seizing an opportunity for visibility that others seem to be precluded from.
“The embrace of the institutions has no political colour and has always been there”, somebody says. And there is no lack of it now, even if it is blacker: On 9th of May the non-profit organisation was at the Chamber of Deputies invited by Gimmi Cangiano, widely indicated as the go-between between Boccia and Sangiuliano (he denies it) and two months earlier for a conference entitled “Let's taste life together”, again at the invitation of the Fratelli d'Italia deputy. Where – if you know someone – you go everywhere, from Parliament to the G7. But better not to say so, even when it was for good.