The 'Obama of Italy' - who lost one

NEW YORK - He's a highly intellectual, extremely confident, smoothly articulate politician who grew up without a father, then wrote a best-selling book about it.

Ethnically, he comes from a mixed background. As a government official, he logged local experience until ambition and fate made him leader of the nation's Democratic party, running for its highest office against an unpredictable, much older conservative.

No, not him.

We mean Walter Veltroni.

The "Obama of Italy" - leaving aside his whiter shade of pale.

So what is Veltroni, 53, former mayor of Rome (2001-08), onetime top editor of the newspaper L'Unita, doing greeting tourists in the lobby of Italy's beachhead on Madison Avenue, the Jolly Hotel Madison Towers? Why isn't he barking commands at Rome's Quirinale Palace?

Well, in a phrase - he lost his 2008 election.

Which gives him time to do several publicity events here to launch his first novel published in English, The Discovery of Dawn (Rizzoli, $24.95).

"There is a basic fear everywhere in the Western world right now," says Veltroni, speaking in Italian, analyzing his April loss to Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, his country's billionaire media mogul. "People are afraid for their own security, they're afraid of immigration, everything seems precarious. And these fears are more easily manipulated by the right wing than the left wing."

"Fear," he adds with a smile, "is not a word that belongs to the left-center's political vocabulary." Veltroni hopes to run again because "there is a right-wing atmosphere growing in Italy that is making everything feel very heavy."

Veltroni's recent visit to the United States included political tasks, but mainly he came to promote The Discovery of Dawn. A graceful novel, it combines Sicilian novelist Leonardo Sciascia's deft handling of the realities behind appearances in Italian politics with a fey leap from realism that honors Veltroni's literary hero, Italo Calvino.

The novel's protagonist, 40ish state archivist Giovanni Astenfo, specializes in the private journals of ordinary people. He lives with his real estate agent wife, Giulia, and their two children: Lorenzo, 20, who shares Veltroni's obsessions with basketball and Calvino, and Stella, 12, who has Down syndrome.

One sadness haunts Giovanni. His father, dean of a university architecture department, disappeared when Giovanni was 13.

What actually happened becomes clearer only after Giovanni, on a visit to his family's abandoned country home, discovers that the old telephone there still works, and miraculously connects to his childhood apartment of years before. Following the clues, Giovanni moves toward understanding what happened to his father during Italy's battle with terrorism in the 1970s.

Asked why he chose to write a novel after more than a dozen nonfiction books (as well as a collection of short stories), Veltroni replies, "Writing a novel is the closest thing to the divine creation." His feat in doing so became an even more "fantastic" experience, he says, when the famous American cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter (Godel, Escher, Bach), a friend, agreed to translate the book.

In The Discovery of Dawn, Veltroni acknowledges, he drew on his own life. His father, the first editor in chief for news on Italy's RAI TV, died when his son was a year old. His mother, born in Italy, was the daughter of Ciril Kotnik, the Yugoslavian ambassador to the Vatican. Kotnik helped Jews escape persecution during the Nazis' World War II occupation.

"That element is present," Veltroni says, referring to loss of his father, but he'd rather emphasize the novel's vision of time travel and its expression of his strongest political passion: "a deep hatred for violence and killing."

The novel's inclusion of a Down syndrome child, at a time when Sarah Palin's youngest has put that condition in the news, prompts Veltroni to express his own thoughts.

Having met Down syndrome children in his time as mayor of Rome, he wanted to express "their sweetness, and also their capriciousness," as well as the "deep altruism" that develops between Stella and her brother.

At the same time, Italy's Democratic party leader believes that "every woman should be able to make up her own mind" about having a Down syndrome child, that "it's an individual choice, and I am interested in respecting individual choice."

"Politics shouldn't get involved with this," he says. "With decisions that involve pain and sorrow, government should just provide the services families need."

Veltroni mentions that some aspects of campaigning are different in Italy. Talking about how Obama's biographical film at the Democratic convention skipped the candidate's time at Columbia and Harvard Universities, perhaps out of fear of projecting "elite" signals, Veltroni says that's "never a problem" in Italian politics.

Because culture is so important in Italy, he remarks, "people value the fact that someone is cultured and intellectual." He says Berlusconi tried to use the egghead image against him, but not much, "because it would not have been believable. People knew that I was a mayor for seven years, that I was able to deal with concrete problems."

Veltroni would, in any case, find it hard to separate his political and cultural selves.

"I do love politics, truly, and it's important in life," he explains. "It's the most important thing that can help us avoid risks for the entire world, such as ecological disaster, social inequality, conflicts that can lead to war. But politics is not everything in my life. I've always been reading, writing, going to movies [he created Rome's hugely successful film festival], listening to music. A politician who only does politics doesn't do it in the best possible way."

Indeed, Veltroni stresses, he takes art so seriously that "criticism of my book is always more painful than criticism of something I do in politics."

One achievement of his in both politics and art adds yet another Obama connection: He wrote the introduction to the Italian edition of The Audacity of Hope.

Veltroni heard the Illinois senator's speech at the 2004 Democratic convention and found it "very warm, strong, full of positive content and values." Then he met Obama in 2005 and "all of that was confirmed."

He and Obama resemble each other as politicians, Veltroni observes, in opposing the idea of politics as blood sport, where stirring hatred and personal attacks is just business as usual.

Recalling his campaign against Berlusconi, he asserts, "I did not make any personal attacks. He did. But it's part of Berlusconi's character. He comes from the populist right wing, which is basically nurtured by hate."

Turning the other cheek, Veltroni recognizes, is not usually a winning strategy for national politicians. He respects Obama for largely doing so.

"I hope for him," quips Italy's opposition leader, "that he has better results."