Rome, Mar. 6 (LaPresse) – “Throughout its glorious history, Corriere della Sera has never forgotten its founding mission: to inform citizens authoritatively and contribute to the strength and solidity of our democracy.” This was stated by Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni in a piece published in Corriere della Sera on the occasion of the newspaper’s 150th anniversary. “When editor-in-chief Luciano Fontana asked me, in a few lines, to recall an episode linked to my relationship with Corriere or with its journalists, my mind immediately went back to what happened on Oct. 22 almost four years ago,” wrote the prime minister, recalling the day she took the oath of office at the Quirinale. She continued: “That day something else happened, perhaps more important. An event that journalistic reports hastily described as my ‘first act as prime minister,’ but which had nothing to do with the office I had taken just a few hours earlier. Because when I went, immediately after the oath, to Testaccio for the funeral of Francesco Valdiserri, the eighteen-year-old son of two excellent Corriere colleagues, Paola Di Caro and Luca Valdiserri, who had been killed two days earlier in a tragic road accident, I was not doing anything political or institutional. I was doing what any mother and friend — because it is friendship that binds me to Paola and her husband — would have done. Being at the side of a mother and a father to whom the worst thing that can happen to a parent had happened: losing their child. A pain so great that there is no word to define it.” “I met Paola in the Transatlantic, in that ‘corridor of lost steps’ of Montecitorio where reporters intercept lawmakers to try to get some behind-the-scenes detail,” the prime minister wrote. “And with her, despite the different roles, a relationship of mutual respect was immediately established. Paola is a meticulous journalist, intellectually honest, capable of uncovering the story. Qualities that only true journalists have, and which are the lifeblood of any newspaper. Like Corriere.”
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