As his four-year posting in Yangon draws to a close, Italy’s Head of Mission Nicolò Tassoni Estense reflects on seven centuries of bonds, the discipline of slowing down, and the sketchbook he is leaving behind.
The fishmonger does not know she is about to become a Madonna.
She is in her small stall in Pazundaung Market, the morning’s catch laid out in front of her, and the roof above her is broken just enough that a single transversal blade of light has laid itself across her face. She smiles. Outside the stall, a man with a sketchbook stops walking. What he sees is not, strictly speaking, what is in front of him. What he sees is Caravaggio. The chiaroscuro. The street girl pulled into holiness by the geometry of light.
A diplomat is not supposed to be moved like this in the middle of a standard day. Then again, Nicolò Tassoni Estense has spent four years in Myanmar quietly disregarding what a diplomat is and is not supposed to do.
“Ninety percent of what I did was not in my job description”
He says it without theatre. We are sitting in the residence of the Italian Embassy in Yangon, a few weeks out from the end of his posting. There has been an exhibition. There has been a book about to be printed. There has been, by his own slightly bewildered count, almost five hundred Myanmar students dispatched to Italian universities, where there used to be perhaps a couple of dozen.
It is unusual to hear a community speak about a departing diplomat the way Yangon speaks about him — not with the polite warmth reserved for people who attended things, but with the specific affection reserved for those who showed up.
He waves the compliment away. “It is maybe the most important thing,” he says. “Not to leave behind people who do not remember you.”
A career of curiosity
Tassoni Estense entered the Italian Foreign Service in Rome thirty-one years ago — the same year, he likes to recall, the ministry was physically wheeling computers into people’s offices. He has been posted seven times since: India, Egypt, Japan, and the Republic of Congo among them. More than twenty of those years have been spent abroad.
The thread, when he agrees there is one, is curiosity. “It is not a specialisation. It is a curiosity-driven career. And curiosity, for me, is also humility — the willingness not to take for granted that your own lenses are necessarily the truth.” A pause. “Except on Italian food. That is a different conversation.”
The substance behind the qualifier — standing by your values while understanding diversity as part of the world’s richness — is the through-line of how he has worked in Yangon.
The first surprise of Myanmar, four years ago, was that the place refused to behave like a new posting. “It was very easy to feel at home. How struck I was by how welcoming people were. The entrepreneurship. The social bonds. That positive aspect struck me so overwhelmingly that it determined my own approach to the place.”
The political situation, he acknowledges, “prevented me from doing a number of things.” But he says it with the expression of a man for whom the constraint became its own instruction. “It was maybe because of this challenging situation that the four years were so intense and rewarding.”
Seven hundred years, hidden in the archives
If there is a single project that will outlast his posting, it is the one fewest would have predicted: a meticulously researched account of seven centuries of documented contact between Italy and Myanmar.
Before he arrived, he had no idea any of it existed. Most people don’t. The history is held by a handful of academics, in journals not many read. He found it almost by accident, and decided it was worth excavating.
“We live in worrying times. Our perception of reality has become very short-term, very emotional. History should be a balm. It allows you to look at things across a different timeline. It makes you understand that what you feel right now is supremely important — is just part of a longer fabric of things that, in one way or another, keeps going.”
He gestures toward a photograph he has been keeping in his desk: a private snapshot from the late nineteenth century, found in an Italian archive. A dozen people, Italian and Burmese, sitting on the ground in the countryside outside Mandalay, eating. There is Myanmar food on the cloth. There is Italian wine. “This is conviviality. You overcome the distance from where you come and where you land. For me, this photo is the paradigm of the whole exhibition.”
The companion volume — The Golden Thread Betweenand Italy and Myanmar, co-written with a friend — is, he says with a small grimace, “in a race against time.” He hopes it will be printed before he leaves.
The longer point is one he wants on the record. “The Italian Embassy has been open here through the era of Ne Win, the era of Than Shwe — moments when Myanmar was pretty isolated. And yet there was always an Italian presence. There is a duty to keep things rolling beyond the peak of attention. We have not always made the headlines. But it builds something that is a long-term asset.”
The two things he will remember
Asked what he will carry home, he picks two.
The first is the embassy’s open events — the cultural fairs, the food evenings, the gatherings to which hundreds of Myanmar people came who were not on anyone’s list, who simply showed up because the door was open. “In a place which is torn by conflict, by polarisation, that becomes more valuable, not less.”
The second is the students. Nearly five hundred Myanmar nationals have enrolled in Italian universities during his tenure — a roughly twentyfold increase from when he arrived. There have been no dropouts. “We have offered a chance to brilliant Myanmar people. And we have invested in five hundred future ambassadors for Myanmar in Italy. Hopefully, one day, they will come back.”
Behind both projects is a conviction about what diplomacy is actually for. “Each human has two impellent needs. One is to fill the stomach — that is survival. There is a sacrality about food. It creates bonds. And then there is food for the soul. Even in the most difficult situations, humans long for culture, they long for beauty. This is the oxygen of life. It is not a luxury. It is a basic need.”
The diplomat’s burden in the age of the algorithm
After thirty-one years, Tassoni Estense has watched his profession transform around him. Is something being lost — diplomacy drained by automation, by data-driven process, by the convenience of letting the machine decide?
He does not flinch. “Yes. Of course. Technologies open possibilities. But they should not come at the cost of people renouncing the willingness to take risk, to take personal responsibility, to judge things with their own conscience. At the end, there should be a person taking a decision based on his experience, on his moral judgment — on things no AI will replace. This is what I tell to junior colleagues: you are still central. The procedure gives you a methodology. But after the procedure, you are still at point zero. It is the decision that matters.”
A second drift troubles him more. “We are in a post-ideological phase. You would expect people to be more open. And actually, the world has become very black and white. The urge to define what is right and what is wrong has become almost fundamentalist. That is another threat to diplomacy. Because the answer to it is in complexity, in nuance, in finding lateral avenues when main highways are blocked. There is more need than ever for that. But there is also a temptation to renounce the burden.”
The diplomat as traveller
There is, in addition to all of this, the matter of the books.
Tassoni Estense is — by his own deliberately self-deprecating account — “not good at any of it.” He says this with the bashfulness of someone who has been told otherwise and decided not to make a fuss. The artistic work is not a hobby running parallel to the job. It is bound up with it.
“A diplomat has no working hours. You are a diplomat even when you stop. The whole experience of the place reflects in your professional capacity. And you have an immense privilege. People debate the difference between a tourist and a traveller — the tourist takes two photographs and goes home. The traveller wants to understand, to blend, to be transformed by the experience he is living. A diplomat, somehow, has the privilege of being the ultimate traveller. Because he can do that on a length of time which is still a journey — but it is a long, slow journey.”
Drawing, he says, is close to meditation. “It always finds something in my life in a place that has struck me. Especially the hidden beauty — a face crossing the street, a rusty door, the everyday things people do not notice until something in the way you see them gives them a sort of spiritual grace.”
When the comparison is offered — half-joking — to Marcus Aurelius, he refuses it firmly. “You are setting the bar a bit high.”
Lunario Birmano: a Burmese Almanac
The new book, soft-launched in Yangon ahead of its official release in Italy later this year, is the most personal of his projects. Its working English title is A Burmese Almanac. Its Italian title — the one he prefers — is Lunario Birmano.
A lunario, in the Italian rural tradition, is a yearly compendium that mixes seasonal remedies, the patron saint of each day, cooking recipes, weather lore. He likes the form because it accommodates everything.
“It is not a linear narration. It is a little bit like a diary. But across the distance of four years, it becomes a corpus of images of Myanmar that are dear to me. It is how I have seen this place — outside the perimeter of the diplomatic life. When you draw, it is different from a random memory. It condenses your experience. And you leave something of yourself behind, because you leave yourself in the book, somehow.”
The book has an Italian publisher and will officially launch in Italy on his return. The soft launch in Yangon is for a different reason. He wants the people who appear in it to be able to hold a copy.
A drawing of a young man, holding a baby
Asked which image, of all of them, he might single out, he hesitates. Then he turns the sketchbook around.
The drawing shows a young man holding a newborn child. He is looking the child intently in the eye. The child is wrapped in a pink blanket — a detail that, Tassoni Estense tells me with some self-mockery, made him assume for some time the baby was a girl. (It was a boy.) The setting is a part of Yangon he asks not to be named — one of the city’s most disadvantaged corners, where an Italian NGO is doing patient, difficult work to support children’s education.
“It was my first visit. We were walking through this very tough place. And from one of the structures, this young man came out, holding this newborn. The way he was looking at the child. There was so much love. The two of them, looking at each other in that environment. It was the kind of thing that gives you hope on humanity.”
He took a photograph. Later, he drew the scene. Then he drew it a second time and gave the first version to the young man.
“That small boy is now in the kindergarten the NGO runs there,” he says, almost as an aside. “He is the most active in the whole class.”
It is the only point in the conversation at which the room gets quieter.
Legacy
The word legacy is offered to him at the end. He refuses it cheerfully.
“Legacy is a big word. One should always be a little modest, a little humble, with a little irony about oneself. But if a few people here, for some time, will remember me as someone who tried — someone who did not just say, Well, the situation is tough and there is nothing to do — then that is a satisfaction.”
He turns the question outward. “More broadly, I hope we will find ways — as Italy, as the wider international community — to remain relevant in Myanmar. To keep the window open. The worst punishment for the Myanmar people is to be shut down. I really hope this will not happen. And I am confident we will continue to try our best to ensure it does not.”
In a few weeks, Nicolò Tassoni Estense will get on a plane. The window, he is at pains to insist, must remain open behind him.
For four years, he made sure of it.
Box: At a glance
Name: Nicolò Tassoni Estense
Role: Head of Mission, Embassy of Italy in Yangon
Years in the Italian Foreign Service: 31
Postings: Seven, including India, Egypt, Japan, the Republic of Congo, and Myanmar
Myanmar students enrolled in Italian universities during his tenure: Approx. 500
Major exhibitions: 700 Years of Bonds Between Italy and Myanmar; From Light to Darkness — Burma (proceeds directed to earthquake relief), Rethink Beato
Forthcoming book (with co-author): The Golden Thread Between Italy and Myanmar
Personal book: Lunario Birmano- A Burmese Almanac — a four-year Burmese sketchbook, soft-launched in Yangon, official release to follow in Italy
Photographs and original sketches by Nicolò Tassoni Estense, courtesy of the author.
This article is also published in the MYANMORE Magazine Issue May/June 2026
