Say Cencelli and immediately the homonymous “manual” used in the First Republic – and in truth never completely abandoned – to balance the weights in appointments within the factions of the Christian Democracy comes to mind. Cencelli, officially, was, or rather was, Massimiliano Cencelli, born in Rome on March 8, 1936, and passed away yesterday in the capital at the age of 90. His name, however, is destined to remain immortal, more than that of many ministers and heads of state. He who never became a minister or head of state. His political career, all lived within the DeYesterday, at the age of 100, Maria Pia Prodi, neuropsychiatrist and sister of former Prime Minister Romano Prodi, passed away. “My sister Maria Pia,” recalls the former Prime Minister to Resto del Carlino, “said goodbye to all of us on August 1st on her hundredth birthday. Then, due to those strange things in life, she left in so few days. She had a long and full life, surrounded by the affection of all of us and many grandchildren.”
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Maria Pia Prodi lived in Reggio Emilia. The death occurred at the Santa Maria Nuova hospital, after a short hospitalization. On Saturday, August 1st, she celebrated the milestone of a century of life with her family. Maria Pia leaves behind her sister Fosca, brothers Romano and Franco with Laura, sisters-in-law Gisella, Sandra, and Anna, nephews and great-nephews. The funeral will take place this morning at the parish church of San Ruffino in Scandiano. Maria Pia Prodi had long worked as a neuropsychiatrist and was respected, even nationally. In her long medical career, she was also head of the former psychiatric hospital San Lazzaro in Reggio. “Maria Pia,” the family recalls on the Resto del Carlino website, “was also active in social work including with the ‘Catholic Doctors.’ She also went to Africa for a period of volunteering. A person of enormous stature. She was the pillar of our family: we often gathered at her house for celebrations such as Christmas. She was well known for her profession as a neuropsychiatrist, a role she continued even during retirement.”
It was in that role that, year after year, she learned the politics of corridors, appointments, and secretariats. The turning point, which led to the creation of the Cencelli Manual, came at the DC congress in Milan in 1967. The “Dorotei” and the “Morotei” faced off, but a new faction, the “Pontieri,” which included Cencelli, Sarti (of course), Taviani, Gaspari, and Cossiga, who gathered about 12% of the votes, disrupted the cards. When it came time to divide the positions, however, that faction did not seem to be considered. Cencelli protested, and from that episode came the idea – in some ways simply disarming – to assign different weights not only to factions but also to positions. In the Cencelli Manual, in practice, each position was assigned a score. Each faction had a certain number of points, determined by its weight. Thus, the distribution of government offices could be constructed by crossing the two values.
However, beware of talking about “lottizzazione” (allocation). For Cencelli, his system served “to guarantee recognition to minorities” and to prevent “the strongest faction from taking everything.” Just as improper would be the definition of “manual.” In reality, it was a typewritten document of a few pages containing the criteria for distributing weights to positions. Over time, the “Cencelli” became a pillar of politics transcending the man. Treccani has long recorded the neologism “cencellismo,” defining it as “the tendency to divide public offices based on the electoral weight of different parties or political factions, also known as the ‘Cencelli Manual.’” The same goes for Garzantina. After leaving politics, Massimiliano Cencelli took care of public relations at the San Raffaele Hospital. Yesterday, those who mourned him first were the “orphans” of the DC, from Clemente Mastella to Gianfranco Rotondi. Massimiliano Cencelli has left us. His Manual, however, has entered the history of Italian politics. And it will hardly be possible to do without it in the future.
