April 2022, Year XIV, n. 4
Francesco Azzarello
Ambassador… Despite Covid
Telos: What does an Ambassador do? What does it mean to represent your Country? We often wonder about this. How much weight should Ambassadors give to their political, economic and cultural roles?
Francesco Azzarello: An Ambassador’s job is to represent their Country within another State, and I stress that I’m referring to the Country as a whole, not just the Government. This job is so vast and full of responsibility that the easier question might be: what does an Ambassador not do. My job is political, economic and cultural, not to mention my consular activities, which in a country like Brazil means offering services to almost 700,000 fellow citizens registered with the AIRE (Register of Italians Residing Abroad), 692,234 Italians to be exact according to the latest report, including over 32,000,000 Italian Oriundi who have the right to obtain citizenship and each year help boost the number of fellow citizens who are residents here ...more
Editorial
Moving to Brasilia at the height of the pandemic can’t have been a cakewalk. Going as the Ambassador, a role based on relationships by definition, must’ve been even tougher. Yet Francesco Azzarello, Italian Ambassador to Brazil since 2020, certainly has not let himself get discouraged.
As he explains in the interview for the April edition of PRIMOPIANOSCALAc, not only none of his many activities as ambassador were stopped by the pandemic, he even managed to “rethink our diplomacy in all fields by reassessing how we work in the office and meet outside the office.” And he adds, “None of what drives our diplomatic action in Brazil ever stopped, and we actually opened up new frontiers of cooperation in the field of healthcare and scientific research”.
What you understand from Azzarello’s words is his constant, passionate commitment – and he is the second ambassador to point this out to us – to his own country, not only to the government he was appointed by ...more
SocialTelos