'Italy needs legality' says Mattarella

(ANSA) - Florence, February 24 - Italy "needs legality", President Sergio Mattarella said Tuesday. The judiciary must "try to recover efficiency" in order to respond to this deeply-felt need said Mattarella, who stepped down from the Constitutional Court to take office as president of the Republic earlier this month.
    Mattarella, a former minister and Constitutional Court judge from Sicily, was elected 12th Italian president on January 31.
    The Constitution tasks magistrates with a role that is "neither a starring...nor a bureaucratic one," Mattarella said in remarks to the school of magistrates in Scandicci, near Florence. "The magistrate must be just and impartial," Mattarella said. As well, magistrates must work quickly because "justice must be prompt if it is to be effective," he said.
    Mattarella is well on his way to conquering the hearts and minds of recession-weary Italians with his frugal approach to the presidency.
    Eschewing privilege, the president has made a point of traveling on public transport as much as he can. On Tuesday, he took a high-speed train from Rome to Florence, then rode the tram to nearby Scandicci to speak before what will be the new crop of Italian magistrates.
    He also impressed the public when he chose to take a regular Alitalia flight to visit family in Sicily earlier this month, instead of flying in a private plane at taxpayers' expense.
    Earlier this month, Mattarella announced the Quirinal presidential palace will "shortly" be open to visitors every day instead of just on Sunday mornings.
    He said visits would throw open "other parts of the Palace and use new spaces for permanent or temporary shows".
    The former papal palace on top of Rome's highest hill - a third again the size of Buckingham Palace and 20 times the size of the White House - is itself an architectural masterpiece filled with frescoes, tapestries, canvases, and sculptures.
    True to his word, Mattarella has thrown the palace doors open daily as of mid-February for an exhibition of 20 Renaissance tapestries, which Cosimo I de Medici commissioned to Pontormo and Bronzino in 1545.