- Title: ITALY: PROFESSOR TAKES IN SEVENTEEN REFUGEES FROM VIETNAM
- Date: 14th March 1979
- Summary: 1. GV reporter being greeted at front door by Professor Agostino Mantovani and entering his house 0.10 2. CU child's cloak hanging on hook PULL OUT row of children's cloaks on wall 0.16 3. TRACKING SHOT room with Vietnamese children being taught by professor's wife 0.29 4. CU Vietnamese flag on wall PULL OUT TO older Vietnamese chatting to Profe
- Embargoed: 29th March 1979 13:00
- Keywords:
- Location: MANTUA & MILAN, ITALY
- Country: Italy
- Reuters ID: LVAAFN80AF50SKEKLT8Z4J8Q5YTN
- Story Text: An Italian professor, who is also a director of a trades union, has taken into his care a total of seventeen Vietnamese refugees -- five adults and twelve children.
SYNOPSIS: Professor Agostino Mantovani greets a visitor at his country home at Mantua in northern Italy. The professor is Director of the National Union of Agriculture in Brescia, and has the space here to accommodate the large group of newcomers.
His wife gives lessons to the children. Professor Mantovani says the children will be looked after like his own sons, working and studying as they did.
His new family consists of two mothers, who each have six children, and three of the mothers' parents. The children range in age from a one-year-old boy to a fourteen-year-old.
They join Kim, a Korean boy of eighteen, who has been living with the Mantovanis for several years. Before the professor took the Vietnamese into his home, they were living in a refugee camp at Latina, near Rome. From a cramped and regimented life, they have moved into an atmosphere of freedom and affection.
Already, they are learning that domestic life in a household of more than twenty people means sharing the chores.
Memories of the hard life they left behind them are revived when the children sing the national anthem of the country they have left forever -- South Vietnam. Professor Mantovani's gesture in accepting such a large responsibility was one of the first responses in Italy to the international call to help the Vietnamese refugees.
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