The Press TUESDAY, MAY 2, 1961. The Queen’s Visit To Italy

Press, Volume C, Issue 29502, 2 May 1961, Page 12

The Press TUESDAY, MAY 2, 1961. The Queen’s Visit To Italy

Today at Naples Her Majesty the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh will begin a three-day State visit to Italy—the first by a reigning British Sovereign for 38 years. More than any other event the visit will symbolise the complete renewal of an international friendship interrupted by Mussolini’s dictatorship and the Second World War. Three years ago President Gronchi and his wife were guests of the Queen at Buckingham Palace. This was the first exchange of representative courtesies, at a level above politics, between the United Kingdom and the new Italian democracy; but the formal reconciliation of the British and Italian peoples is only now about to be sealed—if that indeed were still necessary—by Her Majesty’s return visit to Rome. Until the rise of Fascism Britain and Italy were firmly linked by bonds of affection and respect. By the determined manner in which it cleared away the debris of dictatorship and defeat the post-war Republic of Italy has earned an honourable place among the free nations. At the end of the war it seemed momentarily that, in addition to the loss of an overseas empire, Italy faced relegation to insignificance in European affairs. Largely*through the efforts of Mr de Gasperi and the Christian Democrats, and through generous American assistance, Italy was restored to its traditional status in the cultural, economic, and diplomatic structure of Western Europe. The solution of the Trieste dispute left Italy’s relations with the West, and particularly with Britain, free from any serious point of difference. As Italy’s economy has improved, the republic has acquired more power in the European economic and political organisations and in the North Atlantic alliance. The potential value of this

power in cementing British relations with the Continent is especially great while statesmen are still searching for a bridge between the new trading groups of Europe the Common Market, of which Italy is a member, and the Britishsupported Free Trade Association. Post-war Italian sincerity has never been better demonstrated than in advocacy of more co-opera-tion on European trade. Compared with Western Germany, Italy has received little overseas publicity for its post-war recovery and social welfare programmes. Yet in its own way Italy’s progress has been equally solid. The Queen will visit an Italy buoyed up on an industrial boom, the culmination of seven years’ dynamic achievements. Exports last year reached their highest levels, while imports almost doubled compared with 1959. Retail prices rose by only 1.5 per cent, and wholesale prices hardly at all. The gross national product rose by 8 per cent, in spite of a fall of 4 per cent, in agricultural production. Social reforms have kept pace with industrial growth. In the south, where formerly poverty was endemic, the Government is spending enormous sums on land reclamation and irrigation; and industrial development is being based on huge State-owned steel works in Taranto and Naples as well as on a petrol-chemical plant at Gela, in Sicily. Behind the facade of pomp and pageantry, therefore, the Queen and the Duke will discern national strength and happiness derived from substantive advances in social and economic welfare—advances founded securely on democratic and Christian principles. With their Italian friends they will rejoice in this healing of the scars of war, and in the reassertion of the benign influences for which the Western world stands indebted to Italy and the Italians.