Do we like Roberto Benigni?
Our score: 8 out of 10. Kind words for gay people and children, a plea against war, no harmful words or company turned up; the record on the planet is just thin.
Benigni is the Tuscan clown who became an Oscar winner for Life Is Beautiful, and he's spent the decades since turning himself into something close to a national treasure. He's now better known at home as the bloke who reads Dante and the Italian Constitution on prime-time TV to huge audiences than as a film director.
The film that made him is also the one that drew the most argument: a comedy set in a Nazi camp. In a 1998 interview he said he wanted to make a beautiful, poetic movie rather than a history lesson, and that his job was to invent stories. He has also said the father figure in it came from the way his own father, a soldier held in a German work camp, told his stories at home with humour. Whether that works for you is a matter of taste, not harm.
On the harm test, it's a clean sheet. At Sanremo in 2009 he told the audience that homosexuality is not a sin, read a text by Oscar Wilde, and Arcigay, Italy's main gay rights group, thanked him for it. We found nothing from him against trans people, women, migrants or the climate, and nothing in his recent work with anyone dodgy. To be fair, that's what turned up, not a full audit.
His politics is on the record, and it's contested in the usual way. In June 2025 on La7's Propaganda Live he spoke about the children being killed in Gaza and urged people not to answer horror with more horror. He also warned against nationalism and militarism and said he trusts young Europeans. Where you land depends on whether you hear that as a plea for peace or as a take on a war that splits people; either way, it's his own words, not a shared post.
At the World Children's Day event in St Peter's Square in 2024 he opened with a joke at the prime minister, who was in the front row, then told the kids war is ugly and has to end. That's a pattern: he picks the biggest stage in the country and points it at peace, not at himself. It was a bit cheeky and a bit sweet.
Nothing new on him lately that we could verify. His last big outing was a December 2025 Rai 1 monologue on St Peter, performed from the Vatican, after a Sanremo 2025 opening where he praised the president and joked about Elon Musk. Beware the celebrity-gossip sites with 2026 hoaxes about retirement or marriages; none of it is real.