Benvenuta UNICEF! How the UNICEF Florence Centre came to be

by Marco Vianello Chiodo


UNICEF was founded in late 1946 as the "daughter" of UNRRA, the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Agency, established to help European countries that had lost the war, or had been victims of it, to get back on their feet after the disasters of the conflict. In 1947 it was decided that UNRRA had finished its mandate, but that the care for children should continue under the auspices of UNICEF, which continued to work in Europe until the countries had recovered. UNRRA had a significant capital of properties and money, and when it was decided to put an end to its activities in Italy everything came under the authority of an International Affairs Administration, headed by Senator Lodovico Montini, brother of the future Pope Paul VI, under the auspices of the Italian Ministry of Interior. Montini and the Prefect Saint-Just di Teulada, who became the first president of the Italian Committee for UNICEF, could have used the funds to finance childhood programs in Italy, but chose instead to administer the assets received with great caution, taking care not to disperse them and reinvesting the income. Under the agreements made at the time, once a year they had to send their accounts to the UN in New York, with a provision that after some time, without UN observations, they would be considered approved. The UN would send the report to my office in UNICEF for comment. In addition to knowing that the fund was large (about sixty billion lire), I found out that, once prefect Saint-Just retired, the administration of the fund had been passed on to the Director General of Civil Affairs, Prefect Voci, who did not believe his eyes that he would have at his disposal a large sum outside the state budget that could be used, relying on the tacit agreement of the UN that had never made comments, on programs of his choice. So it happened that the income began to be used for activities for adult drug addicts, in clear violation of the rules for using the fund, which was the property of the United Nations.

I am telling all this because, at a meeting of the UNICEF Executive Board in Rome in 1984, the Italian Foreign Minister Giulio Andreotti had proposed to Jim Grant that UNICEF be transferred to Florence in the fifteenth century Spedale degli Innocenti (Hospital of the Innocents). It was the Foundling Hospital, built by Brunelleschi to host the numerous children which were illegitimate (but "innocent" of this dishonour) and therefore abandoned. The beautiful hospital, the first secular institution of this kind in the world, had had glorious times, and many young guests (up to 2800 in the seventeenth century), but now had a total of nine, and housed a school, a kindergarten, part of the University of Florence – and so did no longer satisfy the purposes for which it had been established, now that the Italians had begun to have fewer children, and not to abandon those whom they had. This saddened the old archivist priest, who had the idea of ​​giving everything to UNICEF. Mrs. Fioretta Mazzei, former secretary of the "holy Mayor" of Florence Giorgio La Pira, and member of the board of the Hospital, had talked to her good friend Giulio Andreotti, who asked us if we were interested. We were, if only possible, to make it our office in Europe, but we also knew we would never be authorized by our Executive Board, and moreover we did not have the right to spend money in an industrialized country. So nothing was done. Until, reading the report of the unorthodox initiatives of the Ministry of the Interior, I had the idea that those funds - which were, again, the exclusive property of the UN - could well be used to fund a UNICEF centre in Florence: what more wonderful site, what legacy more appropriate for an organization that dealt with children?

We had to convince the Ministry of the Interior, whom in the meantime I had informed that its expenses for the drug addicts could not be approved, and I assume that the first reaction of prefect Voci may have been to wonder how many divisions this UNICEF had, that dared to tell him that it did not agree. Many more than he thought, since what he had done with UN money was simply embezzlement, not punished by the non-existent gunboats of the UN but by the Italian penal code. But I did not need to resort to harsh measures because Andreotti, as always a man of great imagination, also saw that the idea was good, and gave us three billion lire a year from the funds of the Development Cooperation, persuading the Ministry of the Interior to shell out another 500 million lire a year from the income of the UNRRA fund, with which it obtained the hoped silent agreement for the future use of the rest of its income.

The agreement to establish the International Centre for Child Development at the Spedale degli Innocenti was signed at the UN in 1986 by Giulio Andreotti. He put down his pen and asked Jim Grant if he had one of his sachets with oral rehydration salts. Of course he had one, and Andreotti showed it to us who attended the ceremony. "You see", he said, "every time we meet, Mr. Grant shows us this sachet, and sometimes we might even smile. But when I think that, with the one hundred lire it costs, it can save the life of a child, I do not smile anymore, and when the Minister of the Treasury or the Minister of the Interior do not want to give me money, I show them the sachet, and they give it to me".

(adapted from the book “Under-Soldier” by Marco Vianello Chiodo)

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