But those two aren%26#8217;t the most gripping personalities. They%26#8217;re the usual suspects in a political landscape nearly incomprehensible to outsiders, where the same politicians fade in and out, promising reform and delivering stasis if not decline. One fringe candidate is different. He is Giuliano Ferrara, a Communist turned conservative who is Italy%26#8217;s most operatic and most mercurial intellectual provocateur. A newspaper editor and former government minister, Mr. Ferrara is best known here as a television talk-show host. He combines the political theatrics of an Abbie Hoffman with the rhetorical flair of a William F. Buckley. Italy%26#8217;s political life has always been absurd, but Mr. Ferrara%26#8217;s recent theatrics touch on something deeper. He is a cultural barometer, highly attuned to the desperation of the national mood. More than the real-politiking of the mainstream candidates, Mr. Ferrara, with his insistence on ideas, taps into Italian anxieties about the future of Europe, the loosening of national identities, the rise of immigration, the decline of Christian belief. In his latest incarnation, Mr. Ferrara is running for Parliament on a small slate devoted to a single issue: %26#8220;pro-life,%26#8221; which he defines loosely. An avowed atheist and nonbeliever, he has called for a %26#8220;moratorium,%26#8221; but not a ban, on abortion, to call attention to the value of life. %26#8220;I%26#8217;d like to win, it would be extraordinary,%26#8221; he said in a recent interview here in Rome. %26#8220;But it%26#8217;s not the central thing. I%26#8217;m a man in search of ideas, not votes. That%26#8217;s only a means.%26#8221;Mr. Ferrara%26#8217;s campaign is almost certain to fail in the polls, but his rallies have elicited an outpouring of support %26#151; and some protests. In Bologna last week, young protesters pelted him with tomatoes as the riot police held back crowds. Still, Mr. Ferrara has helped put social issues on the table %26#151; much to the annoyance of the front-runners, who fear they%26#8217;ll polarize the electorate. Mr. Berlusconi, for one, has declined to include Mr. Ferrara%26#8217;s list in his center-right coalition.Mr. Ferrara, a longtime player in Italy%26#8217;s political tragicomedy, was most recently the host of a popular prime-time talk show called %26#8220;8 %26#189;.%26#8221; He gave up the show to campaign, but remains editor in chief of Il Foglio, the gadfly newspaper he founded in 1996 with seed money from Mr. Berlusconi. The paper takes an eclectic line rare in Italy, at once neo-con, theo-con and civil libertarian; it is pro-America, pro-Israel, pro-Iraq war, intent on limiting the power of prosecutors and friendly to the Vatican. But it has a penchant to shock; it once ran a full-page homoerotic photograph by Robert Mapplethorpe. Mr. Ferrara, 56, discussed his evolution and his campaign at his Rome apartment. It was Good Friday, and raining; out the window, the Tiber flowed jade green. A hefty man with a bushy red beard and bright blue eyes, Mr. Ferrara looks like he could be the fourth tenor. Normally effusive, he was ill with a fever and visibly tired. Settled in a leather easy chair, he lit the first of many cigarettes. %26#8220;Running for office doesn%26#8217;t interest me in the slightest,%26#8221; he said. %26#8220;It%26#8217;s a big stress.%26#8221; Ideas are another matter. Born into a family of upper-middle-class Communists, Mr. Ferrara spent part of his childhood in Moscow, where his father was a correspondent for the Communist daily L%26#8217;Unit%26#224;. In his 20s, he was the chief organizer for the Italian Communist Party at the Fiat headquarters in Turin, when labor relations were tense and the Red Brigades were unsettling the country. But Mr. Ferrara soured on the Communist hard-liners, and in 1982 left the party entirely, becoming its most vocal apostate. He grew enamored of the political philosopher Leo Strauss, who wrote of the tensions between Athens and Jerusalem, reason and faith. Then came socialism. In the mid-80s, Mr. Ferrara became an adviser to the Socialist leader Bettino Craxi, who he believed could bring about serious Third Way reform. But in the early 90s, Mr. Craxi was ousted in a huge bribery scandal. The collapse of the old regime paved the way for Mr. Berlusconi, Italy%26#8217;s richest man, to enter politics. Mr. Ferrara became a trusted adviser to Mr. Berlusconi%26#8217;s nascent Forza Italia Party and, in 1994, the chief spokesman and a minister in Mr. Berlusconi%26#8217;s short-lived first government. In 2003, Mr. Ferrara caused a stir by writing in Il Foglio that in the mid-1980s he had been a paid C.I.A. informer whose brief was to explain Italian politics to the agency. (A spokesman for the C.I.A. said the agency %26#8220;does not, as a rule, respond publicly to these kinds of allegations.%26#8221;)Such a trajectory could be possible only in Italy, where the lines between politics and journalism, ideas and showmanship, appearance and reality, are ever blurred. To his supporters, Mr. Ferrara has admirably undergone transformations his country has been unable to achieve; they applaud him for trying to introduce ideas into a Machiavellian realm of pure politics. To his critics, he is an opportunist, a consigliere ever in search of a new prince, a misogynist meddler trying to draw Catholic votes away from the left. 1 2 Next Page %26#x00bb;
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