Sergio Mattarella, a member of Italy's Constitutional Court, is from a prominent Sicilian family, long involved in the anti-Mafia wars, was Renzi's candidate for the position of President. The holder of that office is supposed to be someone who has shown himself to be above ordinary political calculation, someone capable of setting a moral tone. Sometimes, as the previous president, Giorgio Napolitano, discovered, it is necessary for the president to do and be more than that, to try to arrange compromises, or end political paralysis, for the country's good. Napolitano had his work cut out for him in the Berlusconi period of Italy's existence. Mattarella is 73. Napolitano was close to 90. The previous presidents had all been alive during the Ventennio (the 20-year rule of Mussolini) and the war he forced Italy into, and that experience gave them a certain weight a certain outlook. Mattarella's war was not that by and against Fascism, but against the Mafia, the Camorra, the 'Ndrangheta.

Mattarella had been a university professor in 1980 when his brother, a magistrate, was murdered by the Mafia. He left his academic post and became a magistrate himself. He rose high, and has been serving as a judge of the Constitutional Court, the Italian equivalent of the Supreme Court. The day he was elected President, Mattarella went with his children to visit the Fosse Ardeatine, the site of a Nazi atrocity, in which more than 300 people, Partisans and Jews and others deemed enemies, were rounded up by German soldiers and shot, at the Ardeatine caves (Fosse Ardeatine) as a reprisal for an attack on German soldiers. He sounds good.