Paolo Morando
Eugenio Cefis. An Italian story of power and mysteries
Laterza, 375 pages, 20 euros
The name of Eugenio Cefis, an entrepreneur who led Eni and then Montedison in the post-war period, is linked to many unsolved mysteries in Italian history: the death of Enrico Mattei, the kidnapping and disappearance of Mauro De Mauro, the attempted coup of state, deviated Freemasonry and the death of Pier Paolo Pasolini, who was inspired by Cefis for the novel’s protagonist Petroleum, remained unfinished. Paolo Morando takes these leads and unravels their threads, ending, in most cases, to downsize the role of Cefis and above all to separate stories that only on the basis of rarely verified hypotheses have been linked in a great conspiracy.
The book, which can be read in one breath, returns two data. On the one hand, we get the story of a man who builds many of his political relations during the resistance fought with the Christian Democratic partisans and who, using these relations, is at the top of the Italian economy, paying for the support of politicians and the consent of the newspapers, but also undergoing pressure and blackmail. On the other hand, there emerges the long-lived trend shared by journalists, historians and more generally by Italians, not to stop at what can be understood from the papers and testimonies, but to produce more sensational and uncertain conjectures: a tendency to which this book, which also makes important revelations, is withdrawn.
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