The new mayor of Rome is Ignazio Marino. At the registry office, Ignazio Roberto Maria Marino. Born in Genoa on 10 March 1955 to a Swiss mother and Sicilian father, Marino has lived in Rome since he was 14 years old. He graduated in medicine and surgery at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart (in Rome), studied at Cambridge in England, in Pittsburgh in the United States and specialized in organ transplants: in Italy he performed the first transplant on a HIV positive patient.
Marino officially entered politics in 2006, when he ran for the Senate as an independent and was elected to the Left Democrats. In 2008 he was re-elected to the Senate with the Democratic Party. Since he approached politics, Marino has constantly dealt with health and civil rights. He chaired the XII Hygiene and Health Commission (2006) and the Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry into the effectiveness and efficiency of the National Health Service (2008), contributing with his commitment to the closure of judicial psychiatric hospitals. He has repeatedly spoken out about the introduction of a law on living wills.
Despite professing himself a Catholic, Marino has always declared that he believes in a more than secular vision of politics. Some will remember a conversation on ethical issues with Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini, published in 2006 by L'Espresso.
In July 2009 Ignazio Marino was a candidate for the secretariat of the Democratic Party, challenging Pier Luigi Bersani and Dario Franceschini: he obtained 12,5% of the votes in the primaries. In that period, Il Foglio raised the story of the alleged irregularities that Marino committed in the Pittsburgh Medical Center for which he worked. The newspaper published a resignation letter dated September 6, 2002, countersigned by Marino and written by the director of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) of Pennsylvania. Marino was accused of administrative irregularities and a series of conditions were imposed on him for the termination of his employment relationship: the reimbursement of the disputed amount, the return of the materials offered by the university, the waiver of any severance pay and also the expulsion from the National Transplant Center of which Marino was a member and by Ismett of Palermo, one of the most important transplant centers in Europe founded by Marino himself three years earlier in collaboration with Pittsburgh. Marino had defended himself by stating that there were indeed "discrepancies" on some reimbursements that he himself had decided to report and that, "precisely for this reason a conflict situation had arisen with the University administration". At the end of 2012, a sentence condemned some articles in the Foglio, the Giornale and Libero, for the "distortion" of those facts through "a personal, misleading and misleading interpretation", establishing that there was no founded link between the Marino's removal from the Pittsburgh hospital and administrative irregularities.
Ignazio Marino, as a senator, won the center-left primaries on 7 April. His main antagonists were David Sassoli and Paolo Gentiloni. Marino, in his candidacy, was supported by Goffredo Bettini, a long-time Roman politician and already a close collaborator of Veltroni during his years as mayor. It was supported by an important part of the Democratic Party (which refers to Nicola Zingaretti, president of the Lazio Region) and by Nichi Vendola's Sinistra Ecologia e Libertà.
In the first round of the administrative elections in Rome, Marino obtained 42,6% of the votes. A little over half an hour after the ballot box closes, it is clear to everyone that Ignazio Marino has conquered the Capitol. The electoral campaign of the "Daje Roma" of the Genoese surgeon won over a large number of Romans who went to vote yesterday and today. “We must free Rome and make it breathe again, to hope, to smile. Rome will be reborn from the swamp it has fallen into in recent years ”, with these words Marino greeted his supporters on Friday at the end of the electoral campaign in Piazza Farnese. "We want our Rome back," he reiterated. The voters have spoken, the ball is now in his hands. To Ignazio Marino, the new mayor of the city of Rome.
