Massimiliano Cencelli has died: farewell to the author of the famous “manual”

Few knew his name was Massimiliano. Everyone knew him by his last name, Cencelli, associated with a noun that describes one of the most successful expressions in political language. We joked about it: “People think your name is ‘Manuale,'” I’d tell him.

It was impossible not to use the informal “tu” with him (even though he always called me by my last name). Massimiliano Cencelli has died, he was 90 years old. He was a DC official and, in his last interview with AGI, he explained the origins of “his” method for distributing positions without arguments: “At the 1967 Milan congress, Adolfo Sarti founded the “pontoeri” faction, which won 12% of the party. At a certain point, he left the room where the DC leaders were gathered and said: “How can we divide the positions?” I had the idea: let’s do it like on company boards of directors, assigning positions to the factions in proportion to the ‘shares’ (votes) each holds.”

And so the “Cencelli manual” was born. He was never a member of parliament, even though many called him “senator.” But he was a legendary figure in the Christian Democrats. Always in the background, yet known to all, at least in the phrase still used by parties of all stripes.

Generations of journalists have searched for the actual manual, but it never existed, except for a few observations penned by a veteran of the First Republic who always offered his perspective on the Second, too, for which he spared no criticism, analyzing the rise of the Five Star Movement.

His reading will be missed, as will his anecdotes about a political system for which one cannot help but feel a touch nostalgic. After all, as former Socialist minister Rino Formica once told me: “Compared to these, my dwarves and my ballerinas were giants.”