Vittorio Sgarbi in 2022, credit: Merulana via Wikipedia
Vittorio Sgarbi is an art critic and an undersecretary for Italy's Ministry of Culture. On Tuesday, Euronews showed a video of Sgarbi speaking at the opening of Rome's National Museum of 21st Century Art (MAXXI) in late June, where he used explicit language and talked about his sex life. While on stage, Sgarbi, who works for right-wing radical Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, took a phone call from a man he didn't know and called a "nobody" and a "cuckold." Later on the call, which, according to a video shared on Twitter, could be heard through Sgarbi's microphone on stage, the junior minister bragged about his promiscuous past and said he'd had sex with "nine women a month." Sgarbi also talked about Silvio Berlusconi's sexual life, which he called "tragic" because Berlusconi, who was known for his lewd behavior in and out of office, had slept with "fewer than 100 women in his life."
Even though the event happened on June 21, the 70-year-old minister's comments didn't get much attention until Monday, when the Italian newspaper La Republica published a letter criticizing Sgarbi. The letter was signed by 44 of the MAXXI's 49 workers, most of whom were women. Carlo Calenda, a politician from the opposition, called Sgarbi a "disgrace." In response, Sgarbi's boss, the Italian culture minister Gennaro Sanguiliano, wrote a letter to MAXXI's president saying that sexually crude language was "not allowed in any situation," but especially "in a cultural space and from someone who represents institutions." Euronews says that Sgarbi's loose lips have often made the news. This year, on Father's Day, Sgarbi joked on the Italian talk show Domenica In Sgarbi that girls born in 2000 are whores, even though his own daughter was born in that year. Sgarbi has often been at odds with the public over the course of his career, and he and Sangiuliano had a fight over culture policy at the end of last year. However, he doesn't seem to care about his critics. "It's freedom of speech," he told Euronews about the words.
Jean Dubreil