On 31 January 2015 Sergio Mattarella, aged 73, was elected president of the Italian Republic in the fourth ballot with 665 votes, narrowly missing the two-thirds quorum (673 votes) required in the first three ballots. Mattarella will be sworn in as the twelfth head of state on Tuesday 3 February. His term will expire in 2022.

Attilio Bolzoni wrote an article in la Repubblica recounting what happened on 6 January 1980 when the Mafia killed Sergio's brother, Piersanti Mattarella, who was then president of the Sicilian Region. A story that few among the younger generation know, and one that changed the new president's life forever.

The quiet university professor did not yet know that those eight bullets represented not only, as people said in Sicily at the time, a "preventive" murder — the kind ordered to eliminate an imminent threat. It was also "demonstrative", one of those killings that serve as a warning, that always carry a threat reaching everyone, murders that produce fear.

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