A Movable Chequers

Any place but Rome! So insisted French President Georges Pompidou, when he first proposed to visit Italy for talks with President Giovanni Leone and Premier Giulio Andreotti. Pompidou explained that he wanted to skip a formal trip to the Eternal City in order to avoid the folderol--state dinners, motorcades, military honors, perhaps a papal audience--that would get in the way of the "working visit" he envisioned. Instead, he suggested something "like my meeting with Mr. Heath at Chequers," the country estate where he had met informally with the British Prime Minister last March.

Was that the real reason? Italians suspected that the French President did not want to come to Rome lest he appear to be paying court to his hosts--a posture that would obviously be unacceptable for a man with Pompidou's ambition to be Europe's primus inter pares. Nevertheless, Leone and Andreotti did manage to come up with a sort of movable Chequers that brought Pompidou to three handsome villas in the Tuscan hills near Pisa--one for a lunch with Leone, one for the "friendly and private talks," and one for a night's lodging. Pompidou did not convince the Italians (any more than he had convinced the Germans and the British) that the Common Market summit scheduled for October should establish Paris as the political capital of the new Europe. But he did establish a pleasant precedent for future state visitors to Italy, who need no longer assume that all roads lead inevitably to Rome.

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