Benvenuta

The Stars & Stripes fluttered from the mainmast as Italy's sleek new liner Andrea Doria docked at Naples last week with the first woman envoy ever sent to Italy, U.S. Ambassador Clare Boothe Luce. As the gangplank went down, dignitaries rushed aboard with flowers for the ambassador, and 120 photographers and newspaperman, mostly Italians, followed in a torrent.

The new ambassador, informally dressed in a grey wool jersey dress and tan polo coat, was quickly caught up in the crush. Crowded from corner to corner by the eager cameramen, she could scarcely get through a statement--mostly in careful Italian--that she had prepared for her arrival. "I am proud to come here as the ambassador of a President and a country that wants what Italy wants most--to help build for all of us the house of security on the rock of justice and liberty," said Ambassador Luce.

There were cries of "Brava! Brava!" from the newsmen for her use of Italian.

Italians always make more of a fuss over U.S. dignitaries than any other, but Mrs. Luce's was "the biggest reception any American ambassador ever got," cabled the New York Daily News. The Italian national radio network broadcast her ar rival speech; all but the extremist press carried her picture on Page One, and the weekly Epoca published five pages and 27 pictures of her.

After the press conference in the ship's salon, she descended the steep gangplank, and on the pier waved a white-gloved hand to acknowledge cheers and shouts of welcome ("Benvenuta, Mrs. Luce!"). Then she and her husband Henry R. Luce, editor of TIME, LIFE and FORTUNE, got into a U.S. embassy Chrysler for the 150-mile trip to Rome. As the car wheeled into Naples' streets, a clatter of applause and cheers rose from a crowd of more than 1,000 Neapolitans who had lined the square outside the port area in hopes of catching a glimpse of the new ambassador.

In Rome, the Luces settled into the newly refurbished embassy residence, Villa Taverna, while the Italian Foreign Ministry began rearranging precedent and protocol. Baron Michele Scammacca called on the new ambassador instead of waiting for her to make the usual protocol visit to him. "Since the ambassador is a lady," said a Foreign Office spokesman, "we have revised the rules of protocol." She is the junior ambassador in the Rome diplomatic corps, but under the new rules she will be seated at formal functions "as a lady" rather than as ambassador. This technically places her in the position usually assigned the wife of the next-junior ambassador in Rome (her husband was accorded honorary rank of minister, just below minister plenipotentiary, to enable him to sit between two women instead of between men at formal functions). However, said the Foreign Office spokesman, it would be "incredible" to expect that Ambassador Luce would be relegated to the remote end of the dinner table. "Gallantry," he explained, "is not less important than protocol."

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