For years, a grinning face has stared out from magazine kiosks across Rome, gracing the cover of one of the capital’s most tourist-popular souvenirs: the infamous “sexy priest” calendar. Countless visitors to the Vatican, the global seat of Catholicism, have snapped up the annual publication for upwards of 10 euros ($11.65) as a quirky memento of their trip, charmed by the idea of a unusually handsome man of the cloth fronting the project. Now, four decades after the iconic cover shot was taken, the man behind the face has spilled a long-held secret: he was never a priest at all.
In a recent interview with Italy’s leading daily newspaper *Repubblica*, 39-year-old Giovanni Galizia, now a flight attendant instructor, opened up about the accidental decades-long hoax. The story dates back to when Galizia was just 17 years old, when a chance encounter with a photographer led to the fateful photoshoot. The photographer was working on a project highlighting iconic local figures across major Italian cities: gondoliers for Venice, priests for Rome. With a full priest’s outfit already prepared, he asked the teen Galizia if he would step in for a quick shot as a casual favor.
“It was just a game,” Galizia recalled of the 2001 shoot, which took place in Palermo, far from Rome where the calendar would later become a staple. He never took a single euro for the photo, he said, and had no idea the image would become a permanent tourist fixture decades later. Of the cover shot that’s drawn thousands of admiring glances from tourists, Galizia downplayed the hype that earned the calendar its “sexy priest” nickname. “I don’t see anything sexy in that photo… there’s nothing sensual about it,” he told the outlet. He also added that his current 39-year-old face shows the passage of time far more clearly than the decades-old teen shot.
Galizia went on to confirm that his non-priest status is not a one-off, hinting that many of the other “priests” featured across the calendar’s monthly pages may also be fake models, not actual clergy. Today, Galizia lives an ordinary life out of the spotlight: while his face is instantly recognizable to anyone who has wandered Rome’s tourist streets, he is able to move completely incognito outside the capital. The only reminder of his unexpected fame comes when friends travel to Rome, who almost always send him a photo of his face staring back from a kiosk calendar.