LONDON – “We put the president to bed!” Communicating it to the small group of guests unknown to him who were drinking a coffee standing in the smoking room, at the end of a gala banquet at Buckingham Palace, Prince Philip rubbed his hands satisfied as someone intends: the ceremonial part of the event is over. , now we can finally have a good time.
The president he accompanied to sleep was Azeglio Ciampi, on a state visit to Great Britain with his wife, Mrs Franca. The dinner, for which I had received an invitation as a correspondent for the Republic, had been long, interrupted by the toasts of our President of the Republic and Queen Elizabeth in the center of an immense table in the shape of a horseshoe.
After we had eaten, while I was mixing the sugar in the coffee, the queen and her husband arrived behind me. Elisabetta asked if I liked the evening, while the prince, cheerful as an 83-year-old young man on leave (Ciampi was only two older, but evidently he felt like a kid by comparison), remained to converse amiably with the guests. Italians. Learned that he was in front of a former correspondent from Moscow, he gave the go-ahead for the reminiscences “I went to Russia for the first time in 1973, at the time of Brezhnev,” he told us. “I was president of the International Equestrian Federation and my daughter Anna took part in a horse show. I had a blast ».
In a long life alongside His Majesty, the Duke of Edinburgh has had many close encounters with Italy and its representatives. The first rather tense: when during the Second World War he served as an officer on a unit of the British Navy, he found himself engaged in a battle against two Italian military ships in the Mediterranean. Then, in 1943, he participated with the allied forces in the landing in Sicily. Fifteen years later he returned to Italy as prince consort, for a visit to Turin, on the occasion of the 1961 Expo: he met Gianni Agnelli, demonstrating his well-known interest in engineering and innovation.
Of course, even with our country one of his gaffes could not be missing: in 2000, at a dinner in Rome, the Prime Minister Giuliamo Amato offered him a glass of very precious wine. “Thanks, but I’d prefer a beer,” his English reply. And on the peninsula he had a friend: Fulco Pratesi, the founder of WWF Italy, with whom he shared the commitment to protect nature. “We went on an excursion together in the Abruzzo National Park,” recalls Pratesi. «With Filippo there was only one man of his staff. After a long climb, we managed to see two Marsican bears, which he personally photographed with great enthusiasm. He loved animals very much. If one day the Colosseum disappears, he told me once, we could reconstruct it on the basis of drawings, paintings, photographs. But if the Indian rhino disappears, we will never get it back. ‘
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