Giuli's lofty speech termed "supercazzola" on social media.

Italy's culture minister Alessandro Giuli sparked bewilderment and irony on social media over an obscure speech that he delivered in parliament on Tuesday.

Giuli, who recently replaced Gennaro Sangiuliano after the latter resigned over a scandal, was addressing the culture committees of the lower house and the senate.

In a lofty speech littered with philosophical and literary references, the minister began outlining his vision for the future of cultural policy before warning listeners that he was about to launch into "slightly more theoretical" territory.

After paraphrasing Hegel, saying: "Knowledge is one’s own time learned with thought", Giuli stated: "Whoever prepares to imagine an orientation for national cultural action can only start by taking the measures of a world that has entered the completed dimension of technology and its accelerations."

"The movement of things is so whirling, sudden, so radical in its implications and applications" - Giuli said - "that even the system of cognitive processes of people and not only of the latest generations has begun to change with it".

At this point the speech took an intensely cryptic turn.

"Faced with this paradigm shift, the fourth epochal revolution in history outlining an ontology in tune with the permanent revolution of the global infosphere, the risk we run is twofold and specular" - Giuli stated - "Passive enthusiasm, which removes the dangers of hyper-technologisation, and conversely defensive apocalypticism that pines for a bygone image of the world, grasping an ideology of crisis that is perceived as a trial of technology and the future understood as a threat."

The minister then posed the rhetorical question - "Have we therefore fallen into the era of sad passions?" - which he answered with an immediately "No".

supercazzola storica di Alessandro Giuli in audizione alla Camera per linee del Ministero "la quarta rivoluzione epocale della storia delineante un'ontologia intonata alla rivoluzione permanente dell'infosfera globale"
almeno l'altro faceva ride...#Giuli #Cultura #Sangiuliano pic.twitter.com/KgzJrFPKsz

— Sirio (@siriomerenda) October 8, 2024

Giuli's discourse prompted much online debate, with many likening it to the “supercazzola” nonsensical speech made famous by the character played by Ugo Tognazzi in the film Amici miei.

In 2015, four decades after the film's release, the term "supercazzola" was listed by the Zingarelli dictionary which defines it as: "A word or phrase without sense, pronounced seriously to astonish and confuse the interlocutor".

Giuli, 49, returned to La Sapienza University in Rome last week to take his final oral exam of the philosophy degree he started in the 1990s.

He is due to defend his thesis on Constantine in January.