Cartoonist Mauro Biani dedicates a book to Pope Bergoglio, 'Il tango di Francesco'

Just released in bookstores, published by People, the volume tells the story of his pontificate through images

"Il tango di Francesco" has just arrived in bookstores, the pontificate of Pope Bergoglio told through the cartoons of Mauro Biani and published by People, with a preface by Antonio Spadaro, undersecretary of the Vatican Dicastery for Culture and Education. The book retraces through images, the pontificate of Pope Francis. Not a 'good pope', much less a 'do-gooder', but an evangelical pope who observes the world and warns against a piecemeal Third World War. "War is a defeat, always", his 'white flag' is this. It is certainly nonviolence - which is not surrender, but a different vision: a utopia. After all, exclusion, walls, rejections, campaigns against migrants and refugees, against rights and the Law, aren't they perhaps the negation of civilization and democracy?

"In these works, Biani adopts a lean, essential, strongly expressive language - Spadaro claims - His graphic sign is full of tension between ethical satire and contemporary sacred art, capable of holding together denunciation and compassion, news and Gospel. The figure of the pontiff emerges as an embodied conscience, a fragile and radical presence, listening to the pain of others, close. Biani stages a pope of the thresholds, who looks out onto the margins of history, onto the wounds of the world, onto the places where human dignity is most threatened".

The illustrator and sculptor is also a professional educator with mentally disabled children. Cartoonist for la Repubblica, he has collaborated with il manifesto, L'Espresso, Courrier International, Der Spiegel, Le Monde. In 2007 he won the xxxv Political Satire Award of Forte dei Marmi and in 2013 the National Nonviolence Award. Among his publications with People, La banalità del ma (2019), È questo il fiore (2020), Le cose non andarono bene (2022), Afascisti (2023) and, with Roberto Vicaretti, Dove sono i pacifisti? (2024). (Rossella Guadagnini)