The statues, in a corridor leading to a grand hall in Rome’s renowned Capitoline Museums, were encased in tall white boxes ahead of a news conference that Mr. Rouhani held on Monday with Prime Minister Matteo Renzi of Italy.

One of the statues was the “Capitoline Venus,” a Roman copy of a legendary fourth century B.C. work by Praxiteles; some of the other sculptures were of ancient Greek and Roman gods, dressed minimally, if at all….

“The problem is that those statues — yes, those icons of classicism and models of humanism — are the foundation of European and Mediterranean culture and civilization,” the columnist Michele Serra wrote in La Repubblica. To conceal them, he wrote, “is to conceal ourselves.” To not offend the Iranian president, he wrote, “we offended ourselves.” — from the New York Times, January 27, 2016 

Even more astounding was what was done, for the same eager-to-please reasons, to the artistic heritage of Italy. The Capitoline Museums are full of Roman statues, many of them nude or lightly draped figures. But here again the Italians did not wish to offend, and so they covered those statues up with white oblong boxes, shamefully and shamelessly hiding what an Italian journalist rightly described as “icons of classicism” that were the “foundations of European and Mediterranean culture and civilization,” in order to curry favor with some big-spending Iranians.

Those white boxes would make Art History exams even harder. Apparently Hassan Rouhani did not even have to ask that this be done; the Italian government yielded proleptically to what it anticipated would be Iranian demands, on matters both of cuisine and of culture. No wine, no naked bodies. Such cravenness did not pass without critical comment in Italy, but no one in the government – including Prime Minister Renzi – managed to figure out who might have given the order to hold the wine and bring the boxes.

It was, or so Italian officials claimed, a real puzzlement. In any case, plenty of contracts between Renzi and Rouhani, about all kinds of things, but mainly for oil and gas infrastructure, worth billions, were signed, and a good time was had by all.