His opponents refer to him as "Old Sausage Face". His favourite form of transport is the bicycle. He is a graduate of Stanford, Harvard and the London School of Economics. He is so ingenuously gallante that he says the happiest day of life was the day of his marriage to Flavia.
For more than 11 years he was an economics and political science professor at the University of Bologna, a period that earned him the media label, Il Professore. He speaks excellent French and English. He is a practising Catholic, who attends Mass every Sunday. He is a patriot who believes in Italy.
Put together all the above data about the 59-year-old European Commission president-elect, Mr Romano Prodi, and you might be tempted to conclude that he is a fuddy-duddy old academic who has stumbled into politics by mistake. Come the first serious European tempest, you suggest, and his presidency will sink. People have had such thoughts before and been proved spectacularly wrong.
When Mr Prodi first announced that he was about to enter politics in February 1995, commentators shook their heads in dismay. As the former head of state holdings giant, IRI, he had won both national and international respect for the way in which his seven-year term of office (1982-1989) had turned IRI annual figures from a $2 billion deficit into a $720 million profit.
Despite his prestige, he hardly seemed like a serious candidate for political life. Christian Democrat by association, he had never been a party member and entered politics alone and without party support. His programme was ill defined since he himself spoke of representing "the needs, the problems and the requirements of civilised society". Last but not least, he was about as tele-visual as a Bologna sausage.
Most commentators concluded that his obvious abilities and honesty would get him nowhere. Mr Prodi, however, stuck to his guns, setting about a low-key, low-cost electoral campaign that saw him travel the length and breadth of Italy on a bus. In the process he won not only the votes of millions of Italians but also the support of the ex-communist Democratic Left, under an umbrella centre-left electoral alliance called "The Olive Tree".
Democratic Left had decided, probably correctly, that Italy was not yet ready to elect a true-red ex-communist to office and that its electoral possibilities would be best served by the acceptable face of Prof Prodi.
Fourteen months after entering politics, Mr Prodi won a stunning electoral victory in April 1996, coming from behind to beat the centre-right opposition leader, Mr Silvio Berlusconi, the media tycoon, and proving pollsters wrong. Some of those same commentators then predicted that his electoral alliance, ranging from born-again Christian Democrats to ultra-left Marxist Rifondazione Communista, would never function as a government. Wrong again.
When, by the autumn of 1996, Mr Prodi stated his intention to turn around Italy's public finances in order to see it qualify for the first phase of the single currency, senior economists just laughed.
When he went on to stake his political survival on making the start-up of the euro, he seemed to be taking a huge gamble. He, of course, defied the pundits, bringing around the Italian economy so effectively that the key Deficit/GDP ratio went from 6.8 per cent in 1995 to 2.7 per cent in 1997, with inflation touching a 30-year low in 1997, and with Italy being admitted to the euro.
Having steered Italy into the euro, Mr Prodi was then, surprisingly, unseated last October when Rifondazione Communista withdrew its support. That downfall may have been partly due to political naivety. It could also have come about because elements in Democratic Left believed he had served his purpose and cynically offloaded him.
Mr Prodi, however, did not go away. He came back with his own new grouping, the Democrats, with which he intends to contest the forthcoming European elections in June and with which he intends to pursue the cause of bipolar democracy, something perhaps less appetising to Democratic Left.