Time.news – Foreign Minister Luigi Di Maio wanted to publicly thank him: Pier Francesco Zazo, ambassador to Ukraine, saved 100 people last night alone, including twenty children. Now he is engaged in the complex transfer of the Italian diplomatic mission to Lviv, but with the raging of the war and the continuous increase in the pressure of refugees on the borders of the European Union, there is a bet and that the bulk of the work has yet to begin. .
But who is the man who in a few days found himself on the front of the first war fought in Europe for more than twenty years? Zazo was born in Benevento in 1959 and, like many Italian diplomats, graduated in political science from Luiss in 1984. The following year he entered diplomacy and in 1986 was appointed legation secretary to the Department for Development Cooperation.
These are the years in which military service is still compulsory and, once the military service has been completed, in 1987, Zazo enters the private secretariat of the Undersecretary for Foreign Affairs and after a few months in the Directorate General for Emigration.
He speaks German, English, Russian, French and Spanish and in 1988, finally, his first assignment abroad: second secretary in Seoul where he will also be commercial secretary and, since 1992, first secretary. In the middle of that year he was transferred to Stockholm as first commercial secretary and then legation advisor. He will remain in Sweden until 1996, when he returns to Rome to work again in the Directorate General for Development Cooperation where he remains until 1999 when he arrives for the first time in Kiev and assumes the role of first councilor. Three years later he is a commercial advisor in Moscow, where in 2003 he becomes an embassy advisor, then first commercial advisor.
In 2006 he is back in Rome, still in the general direction of the. Development cooperation and in 2010 the passage of rank to Minister Plenipotentiary which leads him to become ambassador in Canberra (with competences for a vast area ranging from Australia to the Fiji Islands, Papua New Guinea, Vanuatu, Solomon Islands, Micronesia and Republic of Nauru.
Since 2018 he has been reporting directly to the director general for the promotion of the country system and then for globalization and global issues and finally special envoy for small Pacific island states and coordinator for Italy’s participation in multilateral programs concerning the ‘Antarctica.
He returns to Ukraine with his wife and two children in January 2021 as Ambassador of Italy, a year and two months before all hell breaks loose.