145 years of diplomatic relations between Romania and Italy

An exhibition celebrating 145 years of diplomatic relations between Romania and Italy opened at the National Bank of Romania.

Iuliana Sima Anghel and Ion Puican, 15.12.2024, 14:00

An exhibition celebrating 145 years of diplomatic relations between Romania and Italy opened at the National Bank of Romania, after being first staged  at the headquarters of the Chamber of Deputies of the Parliament in Rome in October this year. The exhibition brings together photographs, archive documents and old Italian coins illustrating the history of the relations between the two countries. Diplomatic relations between Romania and Italy began in 1879. On December 6, 1879, Italy’s first envoy and minister plenipotentiary Giuseppe Tornielli presented his credentials to King Carol I of Romania. Two months later, on February 15, 1880, the first envoy and minister plenipotentiary of the young Romanian nation state, Nicolae Kretzulescu, presented his credentials to King Umberto I of Italy. Diplomatic relations between Romania and Italy were raised to embassy level in 1964.

The head of the Diplomatic Archives Doru Liciu tells us more about Romanian-Italian relations in history:

“We are celebrating this year 145 years since the establishment of diplomatic relations between Romania and Italy. Our peoples, however, have a history going back more than two thousand years, given our common Latin origin. And it was precisely our shared Latin origins that led to the establishment of the first relations between what would later become Romania and Italy. This then continued into the Middle Ages, when the first Genoese colonies were established on the territory of present-day Romania at the mouths of the river Danube and the Black Sea, and then later during the Late Middle Ages and the Renaissance, when Italian travelers to the Romanian lands noticed, as did the Romanian chroniclers, the similarities in the languages spoken by the two peoples owing to their shared Latin origin. Later, during the 18th century, the sons of Romanian boyars and rulers studied at universities in Italy, such as the University of Padua. At the beginning of the 19th century, the first Italian consulates and vice-consulates were established in Iași, in Bucharest and in the Danube ports of Brăila, Galați and Sulina. The revolution of 1848 and the success of the Risorgimento movement aimed at the reunification of Italy represented a model for the Romanian revolutionaries, and Italy played a special role for Romania when, in January 1859, the Romanian Principalities became united, both electing Alexandru Ioan Cuza as their sole ruler. The opinion of the Piedmont Diplomatic Litigation Council was decisive, concluding that, from a legal point of view, Cuza’s election was legal. It argued that the provisions of the Paris Convention of 1858 had been respected because they provided for the election of two rulers in Iași and Bucharest, but did not establish whether this should be one and the same person. So, the favorable opinion of the Piedmont Council represented a legal argument for the recognition of the Union of the Romanian Principalities and the election of Alexandru Ioan Cuza. Relations between Romania and Italy continued to develop. In 1873, Romania opened a diplomatic agency in Rome, and its first envoy, first diplomatic agent, was Constantin Esarcu, an important figure on the Romanian political scene and a founder of the Romanian Athenaeum, to which he left all his wealth after death.”

Doru Liciu also told us more about the exhibition hosted by the National Bank of Romania and its highlights:

“We wanted to highlight the most important moments in our relations: the Union of the Romanian Principalities, the recognition of Romania’s independence and the establishment of diplomatic relations, the cooperation and collaboration during the First World War, when Italy and Romania, despite officially being allied with the Central Powers, chose to join the Entente in order to achieve their national ideals of unification. The Romanian Legion was formed in Italy, made up of former prisoners of war from the Austro-Hungarian army, Romanians originating from Transylvania, Bukovina and Banat who campaigned for the union of all Romanians and contributed decisively to the Union of Bukovina and Transylvania with Romania. The exhibition also paid special attention to cultural relations, which flourished in the interwar period following the opening of the Romanian Academy in Rome in the 1920s and of the Humanistic Research Institute in Venice in the 1930s. So, we, here, at the Diplomatic Archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, are seeking to promote history as a means of becoming familiar with the past, without being stuck in the past, and trying to understand the present and build a better future.”

The 145 years of diplomatic relations between Romania and Italy prove, once more, that the values ​that the two countries share, and which are also laid down in the two reference documents present in the exhibition, namely the Joint Declarations on the Strategic Partnership from 1997 and the Consolidated Strategic Partnership from 2008, have an even stronger significance in the current geopolitical context.