In the early 1990s Italy was rocked by its own scandal, when a criminal investigation exposed widespread corruption and bribery among the country’s politicians, civil servants, and businesses. The investigation was centred on the city of Milan, which was dubbed Tangentopoli by the press. Tangentopoli is formed from the noun tangente, meaning bribe, and the suffix –poli used to designate a city or town (compare the English suffix –opolis); an English rendering of the term is Bribesville (compare the –ville suffix, a use dating from the mid-sixteenth century and in regular use from the late nineteenth). By metonymy the name Tangentopoli was transferred from the city in which the scandal was centred to the scandal itself.
As with –gate from Watergate, the suffix –poli became detached from Tangentopoli and took on a life of its own, creating new words to describe new scandals. These included Affittopoli (rentgate, a scandal in which politicians were revealed to be renting luxury apartments from the state for very low sums of money), Esamopoli (examgate, in which it was discovered that lecturers at the University of Bari had been selling exam papers to students) and, most famously, Calciopoli (footballgate, a match-fixing scandal involving some of Italy’s top football clubs; also known as Moggiopoli after the Juventus director Luciano Moggi).
However, even in Italy, Calciopoli is sometimes called Calciogate, illustrating the enduring and far-reaching influence of a suffix that can trace its birth to a burglary in Washington on the evening of 17 June 1972.
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