An investigation into whether Reform Minister Umberto Bossi defamed the national anthem at a July rally was shelved on Friday by the Minister's Tribunal.
The tribunal, a special organ dealing exclusively with crimes allegedly committed by ministers, said Bossi had not committed any ministerial crime and also excluded the possibility that the minister's conduct was a public insult to the state.
Bossi, whose Northern League party wants devolution of powers to the regions, was speaking at a Veneto League congress on July 20 when he hit out at a line in the anthem which appears to say Italy is Rome's slave.
''Never again slaves to Rome,'' the minister said, raising his middle finger.
Opposition politicians immediately called on Bossi to resign following the gesture, and he also came under fire from right-wing National Alliance members House Speaker Gianfranco Fini and Defence Minister Ignazio La Russa, who said he should make a national apology.
La Russa was among those who said Bossi had misunderstood the line in Goffredo Mameli's 1847 anthem, which he explained actually means that Rome should secure victory as a slave in its bid for a united Italy.
But Bossi supporters dismissed the polemics, pointing out that the charismatic politician had his own ''special'' way of expressing himself in party assemblies.
Venice public prosecutor's office called for the case to be shelved in August.
The anthem incident was not the first time Bossi has got into trouble for offending the national symbols of Italy.
In 2001 he received a suspended prison sentence of one year and four months for insulting the Italian flag at a July 1997 rally near Como.
Carabinieri reported that the leader had looked at a flag flying above a nearby school and said: ''When I see the Italian flag I get f**king mad. I use that flag to clean my a**e''.
In 2002 the House voted to prevent Bossi from being brought to trial for another occasion when he insulted the flag, also in 1997.
In that case he told a woman who was flying a flag from her balcony to ''shove that down the toilet''.
Even after a serious stroke in 2004 which left his speech impaired, Bossi, 66, remains the iconic leader of the regionalist and once separatist Northern League.
He coined the phrase 'Roma Ladrona' (Thieving Rome) to criticise the concentration of power in the capital and has long fought for greater autonomy for the northern regions.
