Italy’s culture minister, Alessandro Giuli, is one step closer to being awarded his undergraduate degree after winning full marks in his final exam at Rome’s biggest university as anti-fascist campaigners staged a noisy protest.
Giuli, 49, a former journalist and president of Rome’s Maxxi museum, was appointed culture minister last month after his predecessor, Gennaro Sangiuliano, resigned following accusations he had given access to confidential meetings to a woman with whom he was having an extra-marital affair.
Since then, politicians and commentators have poked fun at the fact that Giuli, who has a history of far-right activism with groups like the Meridiano Zero neo-fascist movement, does not have an undergraduate degree.
On Tuesday at the Sapienza University in Rome, Giuli sat what was described as the final oral exam of the philosophy degree he started in the 1990s. Conducted by the history professor Gaetano Lettieri, the test in “theory of theological doctrines” was brought forward from 9am to 8am to avoid obstruction by protestors, Lettieri told reporters at the university.
Shortly after the exam, more than a dozen protestors from the Cambiare Rotta (“change course”) communist collective gathered on the university’s steps, where they held placards, waved a Palestinian flag and unfurled a banner showing the text “we will fail Giuli”.
“We won’t accept [Giuli] coming back to Sapienza today as culture minister, because we know what his office represents: precarity, privatisation and lack of protection [for the arts],” shouted a campaigner down a megaphone. “It is an insult that a minister of culture with historical and political roots linked to Meridiano Zero should come to this very faculty,” said another speaker.
Even before Tuesday’s exam, Giuli’s CV stated that he had sat all exams for his degree but not discussed his thesis. Last month, in an interview for Corriere della Sera, Giuli appeared to suggest he had abandoned his studies to start a job at a now-defunct news agency.
Speaking on the Agorà Weekend news show the day after Giuli’s appointment, Matteo Renzi, a former Italian prime minister, said: “I think he is the first non-graduate culture minister in Italian history”. However, according to the Pagella Politica fact-checking website, two previous culture ministers—Walter Veltroni and Francesco Rutelli—did not have degrees.
At the Sapienza, shortly after Giuli’s exam, a student told reporters that the hall where the minister was tested had been “off limits”, with ministerial staff and bodyguards preventing people from entering, and that the minister had been questioned for “ten or 15 minutes”, claiming this was “shorter than usual”.
However, Lettieri insisted that the doors had been left open for anyone who wished to enter. The professor added that Giuli had been asked “difficult questions” and responded “with great competence”, winning full marks. The minister had been given the dates for his exam schedule a year-and-a-half ago, before his recent government appointment, Lettieri added.
Giuli is due to discuss his thesis on Constantine next and could graduate in January.
