FLORENCE, ITALY – Tuscan Director, actor and comic Roberto Benigni on Thursday January 28, 2016, quipped that Premier Matteo Renzi had welcomed him and another three Oscar-winning Italian directors in the nude.
Referring to the embarrassing case of a nude statue cover-up during the visit of Iranian President Hassan Rouhani earlier this week, Benigni told reporters: “Renzi brought us to Palazzo Chigi to solve the statue problem. He welcomed us really well: they were all in the nude, Renzi received us nude”.
The British press had a field day on Wednesday over news that nude statues had been covered for Iranian President Hassan Rouhani’s two-day visit to Rome, eliciting a satirical editorial by the Times in which Rouhani and Pope Francis engage in an imagined chat over the propriety of covering the nudes.
Renzi and Culture Minister Dario Franceschini met for more than two hours with Benigni, Bernardo Bertolucci, Giuseppe Tornatore and Paolo Sorrentino ahead of a cabinet meeting set to pass measures in support of the Italian film industry.
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