King Charles III and Queen Camilla’s visit to Italy will conclude on Thursday in Ravenna, accompanied by President of the Republic Sergio Mattarella. After the State dinner on Wednesday evening at the Quirinale, the royals will visit Dante’s tomb in the Romagna city alongside the President. It was the great poet, the father of the Italian language, that the British monarch spoke about, delivering a few sentences in Italian at the beginning and end of his speech to the joint Houses of Parliament at Montecitorio:
“Whatever challenges and uncertainties we inevitably face as nations on our continent now and in the future, we can overcome them together and we will overcome them together. And when we have done so, we can say with Dante: ‘and thence we came forth to see again the stars.'”
“I hope I’m not ruining Dante’s language so badly that I’ll never be invited back to Italy,” he joked at the start of his speech, in Italian.
“I am enormously honoured to have been invited here today and deeply grateful to President Mattarella for his kind invitation to carry out a State visit to Italy. It is very important for the Queen and me to return to Italy for our first visit after the coronation — made even more special as today marks our 20th wedding anniversary.”
Twenty years, in fact, have passed since that April 9, 2005, when Charles and Camilla finally got married. Their story has been anything but a royal fairytale, having gone through many trials — starting with the dramatic tragedy of Lady Diana Spencer, Charles’s first wife, who tragically died in a car accident in Paris. Charles and Camilla had first met back in the 1970s, separated and married other people, reunited and split up again (Diana famously said in an interview: “there were three of us in this marriage”), leading ultimately to divorce.
While King Charles III spent Wednesday morning meeting with Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni at Villa Doria Pamphili, and later with President Mattarella at the Ex Mattatoio in the Testaccio district, Queen Camilla visited the Alessandro Manzoni Institute in the Appio Latino neighborhood. Welcomed with applause by students waving British flags, she met school leaders, teachers, and Brian Young, director of the British Council. She was accompanied by Italy’s Education Minister, Giuseppe Valditara. On leaving the school, she was also treated to a pizza.
Meanwhile, after his speech at Montecitorio, King Charles III stopped by Giolitti, the most famous ice cream parlor in the historic center, just a stone’s throw from the Parliament building, for a gelato.
The royal visit caused traffic disruptions across the capital but, as usual, sparked great enthusiasm among the people, crowds gathered at the Mattatoio and around Camilla in San Giovanni, and along Via del Corso to catch a glimpse of the motorcade leaving Parliament. There were also many rounds of applause inside the Chamber of Deputies and even a standing ovation from MPs when Charles — in his lengthy, heartfelt tribute to Italy — recalled his mother’s visits and the memory of a national hero:
“Italy will always be in my heart, just as it was for my beloved mother, who never forgot her wonderful 25th birthday in Tivoli in 1951, and her stop in Capaci many years later in 1992, when she paid tribute, just days after his assassination, to your legendary anti-mafia prosecutor Giovanni Falcone.”
