It was a ritual he followed for years, summer and winter, as long as his health allowed it. Two or three times a week, around 8 p.m., in the center of Rome, Umberto Bossi came to sit alone on the terrace of a café in Piazza Navona, facing the splendid Fountain of the Four Rivers, built by Bernini. There he ordered a Coca-Cola, lit a cigarillo – a Tuscan – and enjoyed a moment of tranquility, among the tourists. The risk of being disturbed was negligible: here, almost no one was Italian, so who could possibly recognize them?
This little habit would be somewhat ridiculous if it were not, at the same time, like the summary of an entire life. Entered politics to combat the corrupting influence of «Thieving Rome» (“Rome the thief”) and conquer the autonomy of the north of the country, this mythical Padania which had, according to him, nothing southern, the old man had ended up surrendering, conquered imperceptibly, over time, by the sweetness of Roman life and the infinite depth of its beauties.
Founder of the Northern League, parliamentarian for more than three decades and minister several times, Umberto Bossi was a pillar of the Italian “second republic”, this political system born in the 1990s on the rubble of Christian democracy. He died on Thursday March 19 at the hospital in Varese (Lombardy), at the age of 84. Weakened by several attacks and discredited by business, since his departure from the leadership of the Northern League in 2012, he has only exercised a vague symbolic authority over the party now led by Matteo Salvini and renamed the League.
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