Guido de Marco was a friend of Italy and of the Italians; in 2004 he was honoured by President Carlo Azeglio Ciampi with the title of Knight Grand Cross of the Ordine al Merito della Repubblica Italiana, the most prestigious order of the Italian Republic.

He was a true friend, loyal, sincere and strict. Every time he noticed a deterioration in Italy’s policy towards his island and its people he used to point it out to me firmly and sternly.

Every time I came to Malta I never missed the opportunity to call on him at the Orangerie (his residence in Ħamrun) or at his study in his house at Naxxar to exchange views, opinions and, above all, to again go through, with him, the history of the relations often denied, sometimes repudiated, between Malta and Italy.

With him I have tried to understand and reconstruct the history and the vicissitudes of my country during World War II, of an Italy which was both a protagonist and a victim of a monumental conflict lived and suffered by the people of Malta, a bleached island in the Mediterranean.

Dr de Marco was a Mediterranean European, fully aware that Europe had been born within the banks of his sea. Based on this conviction, he had built his network of international relations, later becoming one of the main protagonists of his country’s independence and of his people.

“You know the British very little but when you reach an agreement with them you can be sure they will honour it,” he told me during one of our meetings.

He had many friends in Italy, in politics and outside it; I am certain that he repeated his statement about British loyalty many times and in various venues, almost as if he wanted to remove from history the boundaries established by the Romans up to Hadrian’s Wall, or to erase from the Italian mentality what the Marchese Agostino di Xiemenes, a Frenchman of Spanish origins, had said about the Royal Navy: “We attack Perfidious Albion in her waters”. This phrase was used by the French revolutionaries misjudged in England, and improperly borrowed in the last century by Italian Fascism.

Guido de Marco had a total grasp of the history of the peoples of the Mediterranean and knew, beyond any nationalist demagoguery, that his commitment as a statesman was not over with the termination of his political appointments in Malta and at the United Nations.

Privately, even in his conversations with me, he continued to weave his canvas for peace in the Mediterranean. Thank you, President. Rest in peace.