“I vulisse avè l’agenda e’ Mina”. It is one of the most famous sketches by Massimo Troisi, guest of Gianni Minà in one of his rare television appearances: «The phone book that Gianni Minà has is enviable. You open it, there is Cassius Clay. And he didn’t slam the phone: he answers him! for hours by long-distance dialing. (…) He has Fidel in F, without Castro only with the prefix. And Pino Daniele (…) said: Gianni, call Massimo! He took the diary, ta ta ta, to the T, Fratelli Taviani, Little Tony, Toquinho and Troisi!». To envy her, many joked about Minà’s legendary agenda, which included, in alphabetical order, a parade of eminent men, athletes, musicians, everyone the Turin journalist had known and interviewed.
He was also widely imitated, especially by Fabio Fazio, who invariably began his sentences with «I don’t think it is». But also from Fiorello to make fun of this photo in which he appears at dinner with Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Sergio Leone, Robert De Niro, Muhammad Ali: “It was me, Fidel, De Niro …” and a number of famous ones names. If here the first images that come to mind are the homages to Troisi, Fazio and Fiorello, it means that “A Life as a Journalist” (the title of a documentary dedicated to him) has become a life as a journalist true character and that the art of getting to know has made him an “unusual man” (as the title of his latest book puts it).
Minà started his career as a sports journalist at Tuttosport and joined RAI in 1970 as an external collaborator. In 1976 he edited the entertainment section of L’altra Domenica by Renzo Arbore and Maurizio Barendson. In the same network he worked four years later on Mixer, a magazine by Minoli and Bruno, for which he edited columns and reports on music and sports. Since 1981 (the year he received the Saint-Vincent Journalism Prize), he has co-hosted “Blitz” with Milly Carlucci, interviewing the likes of Fellini, De Niro, Cassius Clay and many others over the program’s three-year run. The journalistic program was followed by “Faces full of fists” (1985), “A goal life”, “Tomorrow we play” and “The other show” (1987-88).
In 1984 he founded an independent television production company for current affairs programs, GME. This company was the promoter of documentaries, interviews and contributions such as the two interviews with Fidel Castro in 1987 and 1990, in which the Cuban leader told of his friendship with Che Guevara, religion and the Pope, which he presented live in Naples in 1987 “Night for a Scudetto”; that same year his long and controversial interview with Fidel Castro aired (immortalized by the quote in Oliver Stone’s 1994 film Born Assassins). Raiuno put him in charge of Sports Sunday from 1991 to ’93.
After the experience “High Class. That’s how I want to live” (1991), in 1993 he returned to vaudeville with “Ieri, oggi e… domani?” alongside Simona Marchini and Enrico Vaime, while from 1996 to ’98 he proposed a series of interviews with illustrious figures (Diego Maradona, Martin Scorsese, Luis Sepulveda, Judge Caponnetto, Vittorio Gassman, Andrea Bocelli) on the talk show “Storie” During his long television career, Minà has earned a reputation for being nostalgic for the 1960s, of which he is part of has suggested passionate reenactments on various occasions.
He’s never stuck to a script, and when things get stuck, he always gets away with the slogan, “That’s the beauty of live broadcasting.” For years he has collaborated with newspapers such as la Repubblica, l’Unità, Corriere della Sera and Manifesto; He has numerous publications to his credit, including: Fidel’s Tale (1988), My Ali (2014), As the world goes. Conversations on Journalism, Power and Freedom (2017, with G. De Marzo). He took risks and had the ability to be in the right place at the right time.