Giulio Andreotti was Prime Minister in the years of national solidarity, economic crisis and terrorism, culminating in the kidnapping and murder of Aldo Moro. In the following decade his political activity took on a decisive international connotation, with the appointment as President of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Chamber and then, with the first Craxi government, as Foreign Minister.

These unpublished diaries of his - which began on August 6, 1979 and ended on July 22, 1989, when he assumed the leadership of his sixth government - thus became the story from the inside not only of our country at a crucial time, but also of the United States from Carter to Reagan, of the USSR from Brezhnev to Gorbachev, of the Iranian revolution, of the eternal conflict in the Middle East, of the tormented construction of European unity.