Italy’s Job Offer to Professor in Canada Is a ‘Comedy of Errors’

As a native of Italy and an agronomist at Canada’s University of Guelph, Francesco Braga seemed like a logical choice to be deputy minister of agriculture in Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti’s new “technocratic” government. But things aren’t always as they first appear.

According to the Toronto Star, Professor Braga was grading papers early Tuesday morning when he received a “terse email from the minister of agriculture in Rome” telling him to call. Next he saw an announcement from the new prime minister declaring him to be Italy’s new junior minister of agriculture. Then came the congratulatory email messages from the Parmesan cheese manufacturers’ association and other industry groups.

The agriculture minister, Mario Catania, told the Italian news agency ANSA that while he did not personally know Mr. Braga, he knew that he was a business professor at Guelph who would bring “value added” to his new post.

But on Wednesday, the Star reported, Prime Minister Monti’s office called to apologize, saying it had all been a mistake. “They had meant to appoint Franco Braga, a civil engineer with expertise in earthquakes who’d been recommended for the infrastructure ministry and then shuffled to agriculture,” the newspaper reported. Franco Braga is also a professor, but of construction engineering at Rome’s Sapienza University.

According to The Guardian newspaper, the chain of events started when Altero Matteoli, Italy’s former infrastructure minister, floated Franco Braga’s name for a post in the new government. “I recommended him for infrastructure, but they put him in agriculture,” Mr. Matteoli told the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera.

That paper called the situation a “comedy of errors,” and declared that Francesco, not Franco, Braga was the kind of bureaucrat that Italy needed. Franco Braga was reportedly offended by the debacle and has not been sworn in. But the prime minister’s office said that “everything is as it should be,” and that the swearing-in would happen in a few days.