During his years beside Renzi in Florence, da Empoli came to the conclusion that skilled politicians take too much pleasure from violence and betrayal, and that this wasn’t what he was looking for.
So da Empoli progressively left front-line politics. He founded a think tank called Volta in 2016, published articles and wrote books on the rise of populist movements — including Italy’s 5Star Movement — and the role of the spin doctors behind them.
Yet da Empoli continued to orbit the political world, developing a network of influential contacts from Macron to former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, never quite cutting the cord from politics completely.
After years of shuttling between Italy and the French capital, in 2019 da Empoli decamped for Paris, where he was born, drawn by the country’s “intimate connection between literature and politics.” The French capital remains a place where authors and philosophers still enjoy fame on the level of rock stars and actors, and where politicians regularly try their hand at writing fiction. Macron, as a teenager, even dreamed of becoming an author.
Stuck in a silent, locked-down Paris during the coronavirus pandemic, da Empoli wrote “The Wizard of the Kremlin,” his first work of fiction. The book tells the story of an imaginary Russian spin doctor inspired by former Vladimir Putin adviser Vladislav Surkov.
He chose to write a novel because he thought a “subjective and perhaps less-rational” work would grant him greater creative freedom to explore the themes he was interested in.