Sgarbi runs for mayor of Rome: needs a mayor who symbolizes Italian culture

Vittorio Sgarbi ’s candidacy for mayor of Rome is official: the noted art historian will run with his political movement, Rinascimento. His candidacy was presented this morning in Rome’s Piazza Navona as part of the press conference of the Promoting Committee for Vittorio Sgarbi Mayor of Rome. Sgarbi’s candidacy will be supported by “Geo” (Environmentalists, European Animalists), “Italia Libera” with lawyer Carlo Taormina and economist Nino Galloni, “M.C.I” (Italian Citizens Movement) with Silvana Bruno and “Sviluppo Italia” with Carmelo Leo.

The first priority for the capital indicated by Sgarbi is the reorganization of routine maintenance: garbage collection, road resurfacing, improving the environmental decorum of the suburbs and enhancing security. “First,” Sgarbi said, “we will think about improving essential services, just as the Romans are asking for. Then a grand plan for culture that will restore Rome’s dignity as capital, putting the city’s immense artistic and archaeological heritage back at the center of cultural programs.”

“In Rome,” Sgarbi said at the press conference, “I believe that, compared to Italy, as happened with Venice, which had an important mayor like Cacciari, the mayor cannot but be a symbol of Italian culture. It might not be me, but fate has it that I represent culture more than many others, so I can’t imagine Gualtieri coming here because they rejected him, or Calenda with his belief that he is an extraordinary talent. Certainly he is a phenomenon, but he is not the mayor of Rome: he is someone who has lived the city and has a detached experience of it. I have a physical experience of the monuments I have visited, of the places where I have been.”

Sgarbi hinted that he will obviously work on the cultural dimension of the city: “The city of art, the city where you come for Raphael must be the reason why Rome means something different from any other city. Giving in to the ignorant and small fashions is a fault. Values are eternal, the value of Rome is not a value that you can mediate, it is an absolute value. And then that alderman or that mayor cannot yield in any way to the objective fact that Rome is an abandoned city, desperate, without night, without day, with closed monuments, with streets and garbage, and in which the only positive action is to fight the Casamonica. The Casamonica must be fought, but they cannot become heroes of a negative world; the positive world is something else. The positive world is the reason why one can walk around the city without rows that is the medieval city, the Renaissance city, the Baroque city, the 18th century city, the 19th century city, the 20th century city. There are many centuries, in Paris there is only one which is the nineteenth century. There you walk in one century, here you walk in all centuries. Not to mention from the real Rome, ancient Rome. You live in another world, though. There is a living reality of the great civilization of Rome that lives where it is apparently dead: this is the life of Rome.”

Finally, as for a possible agreement with the center-right, here is what Sgarbi said, “Either the center-right converges on me or an agreement will have to be made, and I cannot deny that the transition from mayor to alderman for culture is a logical arrangement.”

Sgarbi runs for mayor of Rome: needs a mayor who symbolizes Italian culture

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