Italian ambassador quits opening ceremony in anger

The Italian ambassador, Franco Giordano, walked out with his entourage after NOS correspondent Andrea Vreede compared Berlusconi to sex-crazed Etruscan kings from antiquity. Mayor Eberhard van der Laan tried to calm the row, but failed. As a result, the first copy of the exhibition guide could not be presented.

“Come on, for fuck’s sake”

Vreede gave a speech during the opening ceremony, beginning with the sentence: “I don’t want to cause a diplomatic row, but…” From that moment on, everyone’s ears were pricked up, waiting to hear what was coming. Vreede recounted an anecdote in which the Italian Prime Minister had recently made a fool of himself in the Italian parliament. Vreede: “Things are currently going very badly in Italy and with Berlusconi’s party. When he was recently asked in parliament what he intended to do about it, he said he wanted to rename his party — Il popolo della Libertà, which emerged from the Forza Italia party — into Forza Gnocca. That means something like ‘Forward, cunt’. So I told that anecdote. In Dutch, though I did use Italian terms.”

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The Italians did not appreciate the speech and walked out. According to experts on Italian history present at the event, her speech was in poor taste and was also riddled with errors. Vreede herself said afterwards that she had been asked to give such a speech by the management of the APM. “I was asked to give a speech about men in power in today’s Italy. That is what I did. At the APM’s request, I submitted a synopsis in advance and was not told that it was not good. In fact, the museum’s management even suggested showing some old clips of Berlusconi, in which he did not come across well. But I advised them against it. So it could have been much worse.”

The NOS correspondent will tell her own story tonight on talkshow Pauw en Witteman.