"What we all share is a feeling of belonging to Europe as a common heritage of values and ideas, traditions and hopes, and a plan for the building of a new political and institutional body that should be able to stand up to the challenges of the time we are living in and the foreseeable future". The President of the Republic of Italy, Giorgio Napolitano, spoke at the EU Parliament today, and several times in his speech he expressed the wish that the integration prospect may be given a new lease of life. The schedule of his visit, as well as his official address at the EU Parliament, includes a meeting with the international press and a meeting with the Italian MEPs. As he questioned himself on the state of distress in which the EU currently is, Napolitano stated that "we are paying for the consequences of having made little effort to associate the citizens to the big choices" of the European unification process, "to raise the public awareness of the extraordinary results and progress achieved in fifty tears, and the new, pressing need of strengthening" the EU, "its cohesion and its ability to act". Then, the President said he is against "rewording" the text of the Constitutional Treaty: "Opening up new negotiations can mean opening up a Pandora’s box, running the risk of starting all over again, opening up negotiations the results and timing of which might be unpredictable".
