What is the Embassy of Italy doing to increase the number of Russian tourists?
The Embassy plays the key role among the offices representing Italian state institutions in Moscow. The Consulate General, the Italian Institute of Culture, and the National Agency for Tourism are directly or indirectly connected with tourism. Making it so that our two peoples know more about each other is one of the objectives of the day-to-day work of those institutions. Yet it is the Consulate General and its visa section that are primarily involved in attracting Russian tourists to Italy. Since July 1, 2008, the Consulate General has become a totally separate office. The size of its staff is the same as that of the Embassy, and it issues 90 percent of all visas. The Moscow Consulate General processes one third of the entry visas that Italy issues in the rest of the countries around the world. Whats more, here in Moscow there is a representative office of the Italian National Tourism Office, or ENIT, that is instrumental in promoting Italian destinations and cooperating with Russian
