It is not easy to remember Indro Montanelli twenty years after his death (22 July 2001). Today journalists, of which he was the undisputed prince, are increasingly linked to the network or to virtual dimensions, less to direct meetings or inquiries born from travel. In today’s society, communicators are (preferably) diligent, ideal if they become influencers; Montanelli loved the controversy, the joke, the Tuscanism that managed to skewer a character.
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Our world is now losing the sense of reality and is struggling to know, evaluating the communication that surrounds them, women and men in flesh and blood. Montanelli is part of a past in which a journalist could go to Dino Grandi and ask him how fascism fell; or he could tell you how Churchill behaved at the table after having dinner with him.
The tics of a queen or the eyes of a dictator
He described the tics of a queen or the eyes of a dictator; or he could enchant you by talking about Gomułka, who told him about the struggles and incarcerations and the contrast with Stalin who accused him of “nationalist deviation”. He had met the protagonists of the 20th century directly.
He was the first journalist to interview a pope: on March 29, 1959, the report of his conversation with John XXIII appeared on the third page of the Corriere della Sera. But if you review his direct meetings, not even an old telephone directory would be able to contain them. Certainly he spoke several times with Mussolini, with countless heads of state, he could afford to refuse the office of senator for life (Cossiga offered it to him in 1991 ) and of the fifty nominees is preceded only by Arturo Toscanini’s “no, thanks” to Einaudi in 1949.