Marco Rubio to visit Rome, reportedly to ‘thaw’ US relations with Italy

The US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, is to travel to Rome this week for a visit reportedly aimed at thawing frosty relations with the Italian government and the Vatican.Rubio is scheduled to be in the Italian capital on Thursday and Friday, which will also mark the one-year anniversary of the papacy of Pope Leo, the first US-born pontiff.A foreign ministry source confirmed that Rubio would travel to Rome and meet the Vatican’s secretary of state, Pietro Parolin, and Antonio Tajani, Italy’s deputy prime minister and foreign minister. Rubio asked to meet the prime minister Giorgia Meloni, but the request had not yet been granted, the source added.According to reports in Corriere della Sera, Rubio’s trip was announced in a letter to the Italian government from the US ambassador to Rome, Tilman Fertitta, who the daily newspaper said has been working on rebuilding “the bridge” between the two countries in the weeks since Donald Trump’s unprecedented broadside against Leo over the pontiff’s condemnation of the US-Israeli war on Iran, and subsequent breakdown in relations with Rome.Trump berated Meloni, previously one of his closest allies in Europe, after she called out his remarks against Leo, criticising her government for not supporting the strikes on Iran and threatening to withdraw US troops from Italy as a result.Corriere reported that Rubio’s visit was aimed at “thawing” frosty relations with both Rome and the Vatican, a mission described by the daily newspaper as “not impossible, but complicated”.The paper said Rubio would meet Parolin on Thursday and Tajani on Friday. It reported that he would also meet the defence minister Guido Crosetto, though the foreign ministry source said an appointment had not yet been officially scheduled.The Vatican did not immediately respond to a request for comment.On Friday, the Pentagon announced it was withdrawing 5,000 troops from Germany in response to the country’s chancellor, Friedrich Merz, saying the US was being “humiliated” by Iran. Trump has suggested that number may increase. A senior Pentagon official said recent German rhetoric had been “inappropriate and unhelpful” and that “the president is rightly reacting to these counterproductive remarks”.A day earlier, Trump threatened to do the same with Italy and Spain. Spain’s prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, has spoken out against the US-Israeli war on Iran from the start, while Rome had performed a balancing act until late March when it refused the use of an airbase in Sicily by US planes carrying weapons for the war.Crosetto said on Friday he did not understand Trump’s motives for the threat to withdraw US troops from Italy and rejected accusations Rome had not helped the US, especially in relation to maritime security.Rubio and the US vice-president, JD Vance, attended Pope Leo’s inauguration in May last year and had a private audience with the pontiff the day after, during which they handed him an invitation from Trump to the White House, which Leo has not yet taken up.In response to Trump’s outburst in April, the pope said he did not fear the US administration and continued to speak out against the war on Iran and others.