Mattarella in Berlin, first official trip abroad

(ANSA) - Rome, March 2 - Italian President Sergio Mattarella arrived in Berlin on Monday to start his first foreign trip since being elected head of State and he used the occasion to call for the European Union to do more to stroke growth.
    Mattarella had meetings with German President Joachim Gauck and Chancellor Angela Merkel and paid a visit to the Berlin Wall.
    "I pay homage to the many who in this city, lacerated for too many years by the wall, fell to reconquer their freedom," Mattarella wrote in a message at the Berlin Wall Memorial.
    "The memory of the unnatural division of Berlin and Europe must form a strong call to the need to keep giving impulse to European integration". He returned to the theme of integration in Berlin and stressed that growth was needed for it.
    "Europe must start growing again, developing its integration...to keep fuelling hope for new generations" Mattarella said. "Europe must change pace".
    Mattarella's concern about growth is shared by Italian Premier Matteo Renzi, who has campaigned for the EU to allow greater flexibility in its budget regulations for growth-stroking investments.
    The fact that Mattarella advocated growth measures in Berlin was significant as the German government is seen as one of the main proponents of fiscal discipline. But the Italian president also celebrated the "special" relations Italy and Germany enjoy.
    "There is a very high degree of agreement and friendship," Mattarella told Gauck on his first foreign visit since being elected last month to succeed Giorgio Napolitano.
    Mattarella won encouragement from both Gauck and Merkel for the institutional and structural economic reforms that Renzi's government is pushing through in Italy. Renzi's government "has succeeded in giving new hopes of change and launching ambitious reforms," Gauck told Mattarella. The government has launched a raft of structural reforms including key labour-market changes to make hiring and firing easier and help lower chronic high unemployment.
    Renzi is also aiming to streamline Italy's unwieldy political machinery, partly by transforming the Senate into a leaner assembly of local-government representatives with limited lawmaking powers.
    Germany is "very interested in (Premier Matteo) Renzi's government's reforms", Merkel told Mattarella. Merkel added that it was "aberrant" that youth unemployment was over 50% in some EU countries.
    The Italian president was set to leave for Brussels Monday evening for his first meetings with the leaders of the EU institutions.