Giuseppe Conte

Italian Foreign Minister Luigi Di Maio will pay a visit to Turkey on June 17, Turkish Foreign Ministry said.

"During the meetings, bilateral relations between Turkey and Italy and Turkey's EU accession process will be discussed," it said in the statement.

Italy will reopen to European tourists from early June and scrap a 14-day mandatory quarantine period, the government said on May 16, as it quickened the exit from the coronavirus lockdown.

Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte enforced an economically crippling shut down in early March to counter a pandemic that has so far killed more than 31,500 people in Italy.

Turkey's National Intelligence Organization (MİT) helped rescue a kidnapped Italian aid worker in Somalia, state-run Anadolu Agency said on May 10.

Silvia Constanza Romano, who was working for an Italian charity called African Milele, was abducted in Kenya's southeastern coastal town of Chakama in Kenya in November 2018. No group claimed responsibility for the kidnapping.   

Prime Minister Boyko Borissov had a telephone conversation with the Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte regarding the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic. Prime Minister Borissov expressed his support and solidarity with Italy, which is the hardest hit country in Europe. The two heads of government discussed the effective measures that each of the two countries are taking to curb the virus.

Italy will reopen its manufacturing industry on May 4 as part of plans to ease the lockdown due to the coronavirus, and schools will reopen in September, Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte said.

"We are working in these hours to allow the reopening of a good part of businesses from manufacturing to construction for May 4," Conte told Italian daily La Repubblica

Italy's Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte announced on Friday that the government is extending the state of emergency and state-imposed blockade to May 3 to limit the spread of the coronavirus, although some stores may be reopened from April 14.

A messy compromise to unlock €500bn (£438bn) of EU support for countries hit hardest by the coronavirus pandemic has been struck after Italy's prime minister, Giuseppe Conte, warned that the existence of the bloc was at stake.

European Union governments piled pressure on the Netherlands on Thursday to unblock half-a-trillion euros of economic support to fight the coronavirus ahead of a meeting of finance ministers, with Italy saying the very future of the EU was at stake.

Italy may gradually lift some of the restrictions introduced to end the infection with COVID-19 by the end of April if the spread of the disease continues to slow. That's what Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte said in an interview with the BBC.

The number of confirmed coronavirus cases worldwide reached roughly 1.5 million on April 9 as the pandemic swept across the globe.

Johns Hopkins University's website showed over 88,538 people have died from the virus. The total number of people recovered from COVID-19 neared 330,000 according to the data.

Europe