VERONA - The League’s amorous leader Matteo Salvini and other fun-loving Italian right-wing politicians and public figures who supported a controversial conservative conference on the family championing what are seen as traditional Catholic values have found their chequered love lives under scrutiny from Italy’s press who decried their hypocrisy.

 Italy’s deputy prime minister was amongst those under fire for double standards in light of his decision to appear at the World Congress of Families in Verona.

 The event, hosted in a city immortalised by the famed relationship of Shakespeare’s Rome and Juliet and now synonymous with love, is a self- proclaimed affirmation of the sacredness of family and the “beauty of marriage.”

 Many in attendance regularly argue against civil partnership, gender studies, and laws on divorce and abortion, just to name a few, which according to founder of Scienza&Vita have “made the relationship between man and woman a vulnerable and fluid one.”

 It swiftly came to the media’s attention, however, that some amongst the event’s guests of honour created a great irony that seemed to undermine the convention before it even began.

 While Italy’s interior minister Salvini is a popular face of the right-wing, many wondered how a man twice married and twice divorced was not quickly overlooked by organisers when they set out to find a household name to endorse the sacred sanctity of marriage.

 Salvini’s first marriage to Fabrizia Ieluzzi led to the birth of his first child, Federico, in 2003. Salvini also has a second child, Mirta, from a partnership with Giulia Martinelli which never blossomed into matrimony. Salvini then went on to marry again, to television host Elisa Isoardi, but the two split after 3 years.  

 Salvini is currently in a relationship with Francesca Verdini, daughter of now disgraced former Forza Italia politician Denis Verdini who was in 2010 was charged for his involvement in the 'P3' scandal and then separately, later, found guilty of corruption in 2016.

 He will be joined in talking on the inviolability of marriage by Forza Italia MEP Elisabetta Gardini who herself divorced her husband Luca Fazzi in the ‘90s before swiftly entering a new relationship which he decided not to cement with wedding vows.  

 Equally incongruous are the selections of Fratelli d’Italia leader Giorgia Meloni, who has an extra-marital child of her own, and divorced Education Minister Marco Bussetti to speak as proponents of traditional family values.

 Perhaps more surprising still, as uncovered by Il Fatto Quotidiano, is the invitation to an important round table discussion of TV psychiatrist Alessandro Meluzzi, a married man who invented a new, rather liberal take on traditional conventions when he became an Orthodox priest, and later bishop, while still in a committed relationship.

 The irony was not, moreover, confined to these individuals alone.

 The support of these figureheads for traditional family values and the purity of monogamous marriage seems somewhat erroneous and ironic. Consequently the convention, which was heavily criticised for its regressive agenda, appeared undermined.

 While their private lives should not interfere with their politics or be the attention of the media, it seemed, given how significantly this traditional movement impinges on the freedom of people nationwide and years of progressive momentum, almost impossible to overlook the hypocrisy of what these figures advocate.

 “Traditional family values are essential and should not be corrupted,” the speakers may say. But there is likely never an only fitting follow-up along the lines of: “Unless they don’t suit you of course.”