IN HIS life Giulio Andreotti collected many things: his own speeches going back to the 1940s, theatre programmes, menu cards, museum catalogues, the maps of cities he had visited and endless notes and documents contained in more than 10,000 files, all of which he handed over to an archive in Rome. But one collection he kept for himself. It was on a glass shelf just outside the bedroom in which he died. It consisted of little bells.
When a prime minister comes into office, as Mr Andreotti did on three occasions between 1972 and 1989, he receives a bell with which to silence his cabinet. The Speakers of both houses also get bells to call for order. In 2008 Mr Andreotti, by then an 89-year-old senator-for-life, rang one when he presided for a day at the opening session of the Senate. In Italy bells stand for power and control. And bells, in one form or another, accompanied him throughout his life.



He grew up in Rome, a city of bells in more than 900 churches. As a child he listened to the stories of his great-aunt Mariannina, who had witnessed the annexation of the papal states by the new nation of Italy: an event middle-class Roman families like hers still regarded as an unmitigated catastrophe. He himself was too much the pragmatist to hanker after a lost country. But loyalty to the papacy infused his political career like incense. One of his biographers thought him “more a Roman Catholic than an Italian”. And when admirers called him a statesman, there was always a suspicion that the state they were alluding to might be the Vatican.
He was said to have met his first pope, Pius XI, as a boy when he smuggled himself into a papal audience. He provided advice—some of it unsolicited, much of it heeded—to all Pius’s successors, at least until John Paul II. So close was he to the papacy that John XXIII informed him of the most momentous decision in modern Catholicism, the calling of the Second Vatican Council, three days before the official announcement.
His Christianity was deeply felt. He attended Mass every day at seven in the morning. Afterwards, he would be greeted at the door of the church by a throng of beggars to whom he gave money. He knew them all by name. In his office in parliament he kept a sort of pantry, hidden behind a curtain, stacked with food for the neediest.
Along with his piety, though, went ferocity. As an altar server, he once stabbed out his lit taper in the eye of a boy who was mocking him. He matured into a man of laconic, sardonic, quintessentially Roman aphorisms: “If you think ill of others, you commit a sin. But you often get it right.” Or “Power wears out only those who don’t have it,” a catchphrase that was borrowed for the third of the Godfather films.
To cold-war Christian Democrats like him, the Communists were on one side while they, the Vatican and America were on the other. What distinguished Mr Andreotti was his readiness to cut deals with anyone, including mobsters, on his side of the invisible divide. His refusal to negotiate with the terrorist Red Brigades when his Christian Democrat colleague, Aldo Moro, was kidnapped and murdered in 1978 was perhaps a rare example of a principled stand. Less forgivably, he created a faction within his party that included some of the most disreputable practitioners of Italy’s seldom-edifying cold-war politics. Its leader was Salvo Lima, the son of a mafioso, who, if not himself a member of Cosa Nostra, was in contact with several clans. Mr Andreotti realised the risks of his position too late. He turned on the mobsters when in power in the early 1990s, and they killed Lima in reprisal.
Those were the other bells, the funeral bells, which rang out rather too often around him and his circle. One of the victims was Giorgio Ambrosoli, a liquidator murdered for his conscientious investigation of the affairs of a Mafia banker, Michele Sindona, whom Mr Andreotti once called the saviour of the lira. Ambrosoli’s death evoked one of his most chilling quips: “se l’andava cercando”, he had it coming. His own darker connections were still under investigation some years later, when he was tried (and acquitted) of being the Mafia’s protector in Rome.
The man of secrets
Unsurprisingly, over more than 40 years as the subtle spider-figure at the heart of his party and usually of the cabinet, Mr Andreotti came to be seen as the custodian and originator of Italy’s darkest secrets. His glacial composure seldom wavered. In a country where everyone gesticulated, he would sit with his hands laced in front of him in the style of the pre-war popes. His reprimands were equally restrained. “Excuse me, Paolo,” he once inquired of a political lieutenant. “Are you by any chance insinuating that I’m a shit?”
One critic wondered whether, having put on a mask at the start of his political career in the 1940s, he had forgotten to take it off. The hidden, private man was kind to his staff, passionately supported AS Roma, liked to gamble on the horses and recklessly brought on migraines by eating too much rich food. But he did nothing publicly to undermine his image as Beelzebub or Mephistopheles—or as the man who, by ringing his little bell, could regularly remind Italians where the real power lay.