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dream of his desires and to desire his dreams.
    Alessandro was cut out to be a real Neapolitan, obsessed by the cult of the god Eros – the only possible way of forgetting about the poverty of the quartiere into which he had been born. But in a patriarchal society, acting out your desires iseven more of a tricky business than proving that the annual miracles promised by San Gennaro have been performed.
    It was at this point that his father sent him to the unwelcoming North. There were too many children to feed in this one-room flat: this figlio would become a man of the Church, but not just anywhere. His father, a bashful admirer of Mussolini, had heard that lassù – up there – real patriots were rebuilding the seminaries in the spirit of Fascism. Since God was a good Italian, there was no question of going anywhere else to train for his service. At the age of ten, Alessandro, now ensconced in the plain of the Po, put on a cassock – he would wear it permanently from now.
    But this cassock covered – without being able to contain them – the permanent frustrations of this son of Vesuvius, always on the verge of erupting.
    In the seminary, he made his second discovery: comfort and affluence. Mysteriously, funds flowed here along the countless channels of the European extreme right. The poor boy from the quartiere learnt the importance of money – money which can do anything.
    At seventeen he was sent to learn his faith in the shadow of the Vatican, and in the language of God: Latin. Here he made his third discovery: power. And he saw that wielding power can, more than any obsession with pleasure, fill a life and give it meaning. To be sure, the cult of Eros is one approach to the mysteries of God – but power turns the person who possesses it into the equal of God himself.
    His natural inclination towards Fascism meant that, one day, he came across the Society of St Pius V. He realized that his three successive discoveries would find a table ready-laid for them. His appetite for power would grow and flourish in the ideological totalitarianism of the Society. His crimson-hemmedcassock would remind him of belated spiritual aspirations, while elegantly acting as a cover for the fulfilment of his carnal desires. And finally, money would come flowing into his hands, thanks to the hundreds of files the Society carefully kept up to date – files which spared no one.
    Money, power and pleasure: Alessandro was ready. At the age of forty he was promoted to the title of Monsignor , and became the rector of the highly mysterious and highly influential Society, a prelature which answered directly to the Pope and was subject to his authority alone. Then the unexpected happened: he conceived a real passion for the mission with which he had been entrusted, and became the fanatical defender of the founding dogmas of a Church to which he owed everything.
    He ceased to repress the itch of his senses. But in allowing it to find expression, he gave it a dimension compatible with his priestly office: now he saw it as the quickest way to reach mystical union, by means of carnal transfiguration.
    Two people – and two alone – knew that the all-powerful Rector of the Society of St Pius V was this little man with his honeyed tones: the Pope and Cardinal Emil Catzinger. For everyone else, urbi et orbi , he was merely one of the humble minutanti of the Congregation.
    In theory, at least.
    â€œTake a seat. Two questions – one external and one internal.”
    This distinction is a habitual one in the inner circles of the Vatican: here “internal questions” are those that crop up in the Church – a friendly, normal, controllable world. And “external questions” refer to what happens on the rest of the planet – a hostile, abnormal world that needs to be controlled as much as possible.
    â€œI’ve already spoken to you about this rather worrying problem – the French