Remarks to a Group of Italian Artists.

Mr. Ambassador, Congressman Rooney, ladies and gentlemen:

I am so pleased to welcome you to the White House this morning. I am so happy that you could come and visit our people and our country. I have had many memorable visits in Italy. I have been there some half dozen times and the thing that I could wish most for you would be that you would be received in America with the friendship and hospitality equivalent to that given me when I visited your country.

Your country and mine are fortunate to have the relationship between the United States and Italy in the able and distinguished hands of your great Ambassador.

He told you of the many great and constructive accomplishments and contributions of Americans of Italian descent.

I hope that all of you have observed and have had a chance to meet one of my good friends who is an Italian of American descent--Mr. Jack Valenti. And if you don't think he is familiar with all the attributes and good qualities of the Italians, why you just don't know Valenti.

So we welcome you this morning as a trusted ally and great friend of the American Nation. But as artists I also welcome you as citizens of our common civilization and as men and women trying to express the common experience of the human race.

Before my country was ever born the great artists of your country were creating works which had a profound impact on the life of Western civilization. The modern world was born in Italy and much of American accomplishment is based on the ideas and the creations which have come to us from Italy.

So I am always very glad to meet with and to visit with and to talk with the artists. Two of my favorite paintings which hang in my bedroom at the Ranch are by Antonini and are paintings of the Italian farm boy and Italian farm girl.

It is only the free man who can dare to strike away the bonds of conventions and the claims of the ideology in order to express the world as he sees it. It is only when men and women are free can they shape the intensely personal vision which is the heart of the artistic enterprise. So I am sure that you would agree with me that the artists have a very high personal stake in the defense of freedom.

And so I would remind you that all the rest of us have a very high stake in seeing that you remain free so that we may learn and so we may receive pleasure and so we may be greatly enriched by all you do.

The rebuilding of postwar Italy has truly been a miracle. But it would have been equally a miracle if the arts had not flourished in modern Italy. For your country in good times and in bad has always been among the leaders in creativity and in thought and I want each of you to know how very grateful we are for the rich inheritance that we have received from Italy and how glad we are to see you here, knowing that Italy will continue to enrich the life of man in the future as it has in the past.

I am so happy that Congressman Rooney, who has visited your country many times, too, could be here with me this morning to receive you, because we hope that this trip of yours will be only one of many of your countrymen who come to see our country.

We truly believe that if we can learn to know each other better we are more likely to live in peace together.