Power, so fleeting and so elusive

What was politics in the First Republic? What was power and how was it managed in that phase of Italian history that goes from 1945 to the early 1990s, along the entire path of the Cold War? A possible answer to these questions can be found in the volume Beneficio d'organizzato (Neri Pozza, 2025, pp. 192, also e-book), written by Marco Follini, an exceptional witness of the political events of our country. Follini, in fact, was a top politician, leader of the young Christian Democrats, board member of Rai, party secretary, vice president of the Council, deputy and senator. Furthermore, since he was a child he breathed the rarefied, enveloping and at the same time suffocating atmosphere of the political and power system of the First Republic . His father, Vittorio Follini, a former Catholic partisan, cultivated ties with very distant figures such as Aldo Moro, Marco Pannella, Francesco Cossiga. In the living room of the house and at the dining table sat representatives of the American government, officials of the various parties, men of the institutions in a customary meeting for those who, like Vittorio Follini, had a long-standing familiarity with the world of politics, although in some ways he remained a stranger to it, almost on the margins.

But what about the margins? This is the question that runs underground throughout the book and that in some way pushed Marco Follini to write it. Because on Christmas Eve in the early 2000s, the author of “Beneficio d'organizzativo” receives an unexpected phone call from a former President of the Republic , never openly mentioned, but easily identifiable as Francesco Cossiga . In that conversation, the former president reveals that Vittorio Follini was one of the leaders of Gladio , the clandestine structure that was supposed to take action in our country, in case of emergency, to neutralize the Communist Party. The news strikes Follini and pushes him to reflect on his father's life, from his beginnings in the partisan struggle to the post-war period, a period in which he played a fundamental, albeit marginal, role in connecting Italy and the United States. Thus is born an intimate and public story, rich in nuances and profound reflections , both on the father-son relationship and on historical and political analysis. Follini thus offers non-trivial and ever-current insights into power and its mechanisms , examining the evolution of the First Republic, and demonstrating how the public sphere was, for the men of that era, a reflection of the private dimension, and vice versa.

"Beneficio d'organizzativo" is therefore striking for the author's ability to intertwine these two dimensions - the personal and family one with the historical and political one - in an original form, partly fictional, partly documentary , able to pass fluidly from one to the other and enriching the reading with new implications, suggestions and emotional, intellectual and political stimuli.

The final result is the story of a father and, to a much lesser extent, of a son ; a tale of a small mystery that has intertwined their destinies and an epilogue that has never been found. But as Filippo Ceccarelli rightly says in the introduction to the book, there is something more than a simple family recollection: "The events narrated in these pages certainly concern a father and a son; but it is precisely through them that the history of power in Italy is recomposed and complicated, always ambiguous and elusive, as it has always been, but that two generations have lived in different ways".