On 7 March, CERN welcomed Her Excellency Ms Giorgia Meloni, President of the Council of Ministers of the Italian Republic. The Prime Minister and her delegation visited Point 1 of the LHC alongside CERN’s Director-General, Fabiola Gianotti; the Director for Finance and Human Resources, Raphaël Bello; the Director for Research and Computing, Joachim Mnich; the Director for International Relations, Charlotte Warakaulle; senior Italian physicist and President of the TERA Foundation, Ugo Amaldi; the Head of the Theoretical Physics department, Gian Giudice; the Head of the Information Technology department, Enrica Porcari; the Italian spokesperson of the LHCb collaboration, Vincenzo Vagnoni; the Italian former department Head in charge of the Management liaison for Italy, Roberto Losito and the President of INFN, Antonio Zoccoli.

Following an introduction to CERN’s activities by the Director-General, the delegation then visited, accompanied by Ludovico Pontecorvo from the ATLAS collaboration, the ATLAS control room and experiment cavern, as well as the LHC tunnel. They also had the opportunity to discover CERN Science Gateway’s exhibitions.