... explored the meaning of the warfare between the judiciary (or at least some magistrates) and the executive (or at least this Premier) for Italy’s separation of powers. These two paths now come together in the figure of Giorgio Napolitano.

Napolitano appears to many to be the drabbest of politicians, that most unusual of Neapolitans (which he is by both birth and name)—a quiet, modest, figure so lacking in any flamboyance or color that he is widely considered simply dull. (The producer of a RAI television political panel discussion was once instructed to avoid inviting Napolitano unless there was somebody zingy, like Alessandra Mussolini, on the other side.)
He always puzzled Americans. Many Italians know lots of facts about American politics, but few have a real “feel” for us, enough to put events in context and even be able to predict and anticipate. But two old PCI hands had outstanding comprehension: long-time L’Unitá correspondent Alberto Jacoviello and Napolitano. Napolitano has excellent English, visits regularly, seems the picture of reasonable moderation. When asked a question by a Yank, he understands both the question and its implications. But what he gives back, in quiet, reasoned terms, is pure Botteghe Oscure, pure party boiler plate. It’s best to ask him something on which there is no fixed party position.
And he puzzles his colleagues. In the middle of the blazing Mani pulite destruction of the Italian Center and Right (September, 1992), Socialist Deputy Sergio Moroni killed himself and addressed a last letter to the President of the Chamber of Deputies, Napolitano. The letter accused the Milan magistrates of having created a “climate of pogrom” that was endangering Italy’s freedom. Since the Communists were giving the magistrates unqualified support and stood to be the clear political beneficiaries of Mani pulite, Napolitano had every reason to suppress the letter (by, for example, turning it over to law enforcement authorities). Instead, he made the letter public and then featured it in a book he was writing.
Napolitano was the great pioneer of the increasing participation of the Italian Left in European and Atlantic affairs. The most dramatic moment came in 1984 when he took his seat as the first Communist member of the North Atlantic Assembly (the NATO parliamentarians) to the warm applause of some in the room and the appalled silence of others. What were they to make of this reasonable, soft-spoken man who understood alliance politics, but delivered the hard Communist line (in the days when it really was hard)?
The key to the Napolitano puzzle goes back to the Salerno Switch. When Togliatti transformed his embattled movement into a mass party, he also called on the comrades to loyally support the (still-to-be-written) Italian constitution and constitutional institutions. While some, as we have seen, saw this as cynical, or as mere temporary tactics, Napolitano is the prime distillation of pure belief in the Switch. Napolitano remained resolutely loyal to his party (as his American interlocutors kept discovering) but, over the years, developed an even stronger loyalty: to democratic Italy and its fundamental institution, the Parliament. Napolitano chaired the lower House from 1992 to 1994 (the first Berlusconi election). The agony of Moroni and the attacks on parliamentary prerogatives by the magistrates bothered him intensely.
Napolitano once told me that of all the reasons he had for loathing (my term—he never used strong language) Silvio Berlusconi, the most important was his (Napolitano’s) belief that Berlusconi had little respect for the Parliament and parliamentary institutions.