The EU may be waiting urgently for answers from Italy over its contested budget, but another hot topic is the talk of Rome's corridors of power: embarrassing dads.
Italian police last week seized land belonging to the father of deputy prime minister Luigi Di Maio as part of a probe into alleged fraud and illegal employment at his company which has left his son – the leader of the anti-establishment Five Star Movement (M5S) – red faced and answering difficult questions.
But Antonio Di Maio is just the latest parent to embarrass his high-flying offspring in Italy's political circles.
“I'd like to look Luigi's father in the eye and say that I hope that he does not go through what his son and friends put my father and my family through,” former minister Maria Elena Boschi, 37, said on Twitter this week.
Boschi senior was investigated in late 2017 — and later cleared — in a scandal which saw his centre-left daughter accused of using her position to try to save a local bank where her father worked.
At the time, Luigi Di Maio's M5S party was quick to demand both Boschi's political scalp and that of her ally, former prime minister Matteo Renzi.
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“My father was dragged through the mud by a campaign of hatred,” Boschi said.Renzi, 43, suffered his own headache after his father, Tiziano, was placed under investigation in early 2017 for alleged influence-peddling.
The case against him was shelved last month.
'The silent treatment'
“If I had done what Di Maio senior did, the M5S would already have launched an appeal on social networks for the return of the death penalty,” Tiziano Renzi said on Facebook.
Luigi Di Maio, 32, has been quick to distance himself from his dad, saying that “for years we never even talked. We didn't have a good relationship”.
“There was a 'blackout' period because I didn't like some of the ways he was behaving,” he said.
The politician, who now owns half of his father's company, worked there for three months in 2008 and published his pay slip on Wednesday in an attempt to show the business had been run by the books.
But critics smelled a rat, questioning whether the young politician known for his dapper appearance really worked there as a manual labourer, as claimed.
“I believed the company respected the rules. I'm the one who now has to ask my father to explain,” he said.
Luigi di Maio. Photo: AFP
And even the father of Italy's Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte has waded into the fray, calling for Di Maio to be left alone.
Di Maio is obliged under the movement's rules to step down as M5S chief after this mandate, but his likely successor, Alessandro Di Battista, is no luckier with his own father.
Vittorio Di Battista, his father, is a self-declared fascist who was placed under investigation earlier this year for threats to the Italian president after evoking the storming of the Bastille in Paris during the French revolution.
“When the people of Paris attacked and destroyed that huge building, symbol of the evil of power, the vast mounds of rubble were then sold by a local builder, making him wealthy.”
“The Quirinale Palace (and presidential residence) is more than the Bastille, it has paintings, tapestries, rugs and statues,” he said in May in a now-deleted post on Facebook, according to Italian media.
The Bastille violence led to the overthrow — and eventual execution — of King Louis XVI.
Asked in 2015 if he would like his son to become foreign minister, Vittorio replied: “I would prefer interior minister. I hope he will become nastier than his old man.”
Meanwhile the usually outspoken Matteo Salvini, has been forced to bite his tongue over the latest scandal involving his co-deputy.
The head of the far-right League, which governs alongside the M5S, is doubtless quietly praying he escapes the parent trap.
His only comment: “I am happy my father is a quiet pensioner, who at most volunteers in the local parish or plays bridge,” he said on Tuesday.
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