Incoming Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni won’t be moving into the opulent official residence in Rome because she and her partner prefer to raise their daughter in the suburbs.
The conservative leader, who was swept into power Sunday amid a growing backlash against European globalists, will remain in Mostacciano, a suburb of the Italian capital, where she and Andrea Giambruno now live.
“Do you think we’d raise a six-year-old child in a Versailles-like palazzo?” Giambruno, a TV journalist, said in a rare interview with Italian daily newspaper Corriere della Sera. “We’ve already got a house.”
The prime minister’s official residence is the 16th century Palazzo Chigi, located in the heart of the city. It traditionally serves as both the residence and the office of Italy’s leader.
Meloni’s party, Brothers of Italy, sits atop a coalition of right-wing parties and is in the process of forming a new government after the election. Meloni is reportedly in talks with allies Matteo Salvini and former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi to assemble a cabinet before taking office at the end of next month.
Critics on the Left have branded Meloni a fascist and compared her to World War II-era dictator Benito Mussolini, in large part for her fierce criticism of globalists and her early political roots in a party linked to the infamous figure.
YouTube this week took down a video of her delivering a powerful and career-defining speech in 2019, claiming it violated “community guidelines.”
“Why is the family an enemy? Why is the family so frightening?” Meloni said in the speech. “There is a single answer to all these questions. Because it defines us. Because it is our identity. Because everything that defines us is now an enemy for those who would like us to no longer have an identity and to simply be perfect consumer slaves.”
Incoming Italian Prime Minister Georgia Meloni will not move into the palatial Palazzo Chigi in Rome, where Italian prime ministers have traditionally lived. (Photo by Antonio Masiello/Getty Images)
Meloni, who was raised in Rome by a single mom who wrote romance novels, won her first local election at 21 and became Italy’s youngest ever minister when former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi made her youth minister in 2008. In her 2021 autobiography, “I am Giorgia,” Meloni described joining a local chapter of the Italian Social Movement, created in 1946 by supporters of Mussolini.
She compares her party and her politics to Republicans in the U.S. and Britain’s Conservative Party, and even left-wing former Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi called claims Meloni is a fascist “fake news.”
“I’m not her best friend,” Renzi told CNN. “We are rivals but she is not a danger to democracy. The idea there is a risk of fascism in Italy is absolutely fake news.”
Meloni’s unapologetic defense of faith and family has resonated with conservatives around the world who are suspicious of growing power of globalist groups such as the World Economic Forum. She is also a fierce critic of radical gender theory and illegal immigration.
“Yes to natural families, no to the LGBT lobby, yes to sexual identity, no to gender ideology, yes to the culture of life, no to the abyss of death,” she said in a June speech. “No to the violence of Islam, yes to safer borders, no to mass immigration, yes to work for our people, no to major international finance.”
Giambruno said Meloni has proven that Italy is hungry for change.
“She has achieved something unthinkable given where she came from,” Giambruno said in the interview. “She has showed that if you work hard without taking shortcuts, you will make it.”
Giambruno and Meloni are not married, and Meloni has been accused of hypocrisy for promoting traditional, Christian family values.
“Saying that if you are not married you cannot defend the natural family based on marriage is a bit like saying that if you are young, you cannot care about the problems of the elderly,” she wrote in her autobiography last year.