“Wine, the land, farming skills and entrepreneurial activity are gifts from God, but let us not forget that the Creator has entrusted them to us, to our sensitivity and honesty, so that we may make them, as Scripture says, a true source of joy for the heart of man and of every man, not just those who have more possibilities. Thank you then for choosing to inspire your activity with sentiments of concord, help to the weakest and respect for Creation, following the example of St Francis of Assisi.”
That is what Pope Francis told a delegation of more than 100 Italian producers who were granted an audience with him early last year in an event organised by Veronafiere, the body behind the Vinitaly wine show.
Born in Buenos Aires, Jorge Bergoglio, to use the late Pope’s non-pontificial name, was the eldest child of Italian parents who fled Benito Mussolini’s Italy in the 1920s. His father, Mario Bergoglio, hailed from the Piemontese province of Asti, itself a major wine centre, and his mother, Regina Sívori, was also of north Italian descent, though she was born in Argentina.
Bergoglio made history in 2013 when he became the first non-European born Pope in more than a millennium, returning to his ancestral homeland of Italy. Shortly after Bergoglio’s election to the Papacy, the Bishop of Asti gave him a bottle of Grignolino...
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