“Wine is emblem of our traditions, history, culture and work”. Words of Giorgio Napolitano

“Wine is the emblem of our traditions, history, culture and work”. Words, said on April 9, 2010, by the first President of the Italian Republic to pay homage to wine with his presence, at Vinitaly. The first time for a Head of State in the most important event of Italian wine, was that of Giorgio Napolitano, tenant of the Quirinal from 2006 to 2015, Senator for Life and President Emeritus, who passed away today, in Rome, at the venerable age of 98, after a long hospitalization in a clinic in the city.
The successor of Carlo Azeglio Ciampi and predecessor of Sergio Mattarella (also present at Vinitaly, in 2016, for the 50th edition of the fair, ed.), several times Napolitano has been in direct contact with the world of wine, as President of the Republic. As in 2008, when he received at the Quirinale a delegation of the “Cities of Wine” and supported the idea of a 2009 as the “Year of Wine Tourism in Europe” (WineNews was also present at the event), and then the Women of Wine, in 2011, and his was the opening message of the Assoenologi Congress No. 69, in the Community of San Patrignano, in 2014.
“Once there were wine regions”, Napolitano said in 2016, at Vinitaly, “today wine is excellence in all regions of Italy. Wine is an emblem of our strong traditions, history, culture and work. And it is also an emblem of the strength of diversity in unity, because differences are fundamental in order not to risk falling flat on identities that do not belong to us; they are points of comparison and stimuli that push the whole system, in synergy, to improve. And with this unity, Italian wine must move together in order not to lose the positions of excellence it has conquered and to gain new ones”. These words are as relevant then as they are today, when Italy and the wine world greet the President Emeritus of the Italian Republic, Giorgio Napolitano.