November 18, 2003
Signor Montanelli’s Giornale, etc.
I am certain that the great majority of the referrers who arrive at this page having searched for Il Giornale or Il Giornale Nuovo are looking for information from or about the newspaper of that name, founded in Milan in 1974 by journalist and editor Indro Montanelli (1909-2001, left), and not some Welsh bloke’s weblog. I’m not sure that Il Giornale even has an on-line presence - at least I haven’t found it included in any listings of Italian news(paper) sites - but, if I could find one, I’d put a link to it on the left of this page, along with a blurb in my best pidgin Italian, in the hope of helping these visitors on their way to their desired destination.
Signor Montanelli must have been quite a guy: this is a man who, as a freelancer covering the Spanish Civil War, was expelled from the Italian journalists’ union and forced into temporary exile because of the objective tenor of his reports. In previous years, he had supported the Fascists, and had served in Mussolini’s Abyssinian campaign. In 1939 he returned to Italy, securing a job at Il Corriere della Sera. In 1943 he was arrested by the Nazis and sentenced to death for an article he wrote about Mussolini, but managed to escape after 10 months in prison. He was one of the first journalists to report back from the 1956 uprising in Budapest. In 1974, he quit Il Corriere, dismayed by an editorial lurch to the political left, and went on to found the centre-right-aligned Il Giornale Nuovo. Among those who visited him in hospital after he was shot four times in the legs by Red Brigade terrorists in Milan in 1977, was his good friend, Silvio Berlusconi.
The following year, Berlusconi became a minority shareholder in Il Giornale. When, however, in 1994, Berlusconi decided to enter politics, Montanelli (by then aged 86) saw a conflict of interests, and quit, setting up yet another newspaper, La Voce, which he used to oppose and criticise his former friend’s political progress. ‘I was forced to found a new newspaper when I became aware of the incompatibility between my independence and the will of the proprietor,’ he said, ‘who, until he entered politics, had been an exemplary proprietor.’ In another show of straight-backed stubbornness, in 1991 he refused an appointment as senator-for-life from the then-president Francesco Cossiga, stating ‘Unfortunately, the model of an absolutely independent journalist prevents me from accepting this flattering offer.’
Montanelli’s new journal was far from being the first thus named. A Google image-search turned up this ’30s-vintage Il Nuovo Giornale front page with alarming news of a ‘proclamation to the German Armed Forces: answer violence with violence’…
…and, going much further back still, this eighteenth-century Venetian almanac’s title-page:
*
desearia saber si este escritor pertenece a mi arbol genealogico
ursula Montanelli
gracias
I just made a brief search on the internet. It seems that the Italian daily "Il Giornale" doesn't have a website. As a matter of fact, in this list of Italian newspapers, Il Giornale appears to be the only one without a website.
However, very briefly, after Montanelli left the newspaper in 1994, Vittorio Feltri was apponted as the new editor in chief. Il Giornale turned out to be a right-wing daily, although I wouldn't say it backed up Berlusconi by all means. Personally I think Vittorio Feltri is a good journalist, a bourgeois and a conservative. I guess the main difference with Montanelli's line was that Feltri had no problem to accept that a politician (and prime minister) could be also the owner of his newspaper. That was, most of all, what Montanelli couldn't accept on principle.
In 2000 Feltri founded a new daily called Libero and left Il Giornale. The new editor in chief is now Maurizio Belpietro, a collaborator of Feltri. Don't know that much about the newspaper at present. It is for sure still a right-wing newspaper owned by Berlusconi, but I don't think it is famous anymore.
