When US president George Bush visits Rome next week he will be met with pomp and ceremony by Italy's leaders, but also by an angry anti-war demonstration which some government ministers have said they might attend.
Prime minister Romano Prodi said today he hoped none of his ministers - some of them hard-line communists - would attend the rally, although he would not ban them from doing so.
"I have not made an appeal to my ministers not to participate, I have said that it seems to me obvious that this should not happen, that's all," Mr Prodi said in a radio interview.
But the prospect of ministers marching in an anti-Bush protest on one side of town while the US president is being greeted by Mr
Prodi on the other next Saturday is a possibility and would be an embarrassment to the prime minister.
Junior finance minister, Paolo Cento, of the pacifist Green Party, has said he is considering attending. "We have nothing personal against Bush. Our objections are all about war and peace," Cento told Il Corriere della Sera daily.
Franco Giordano, head of the biggest of two communist parties in the government, said he would not attend the protest but that he agreed with its aims.
"A democratic, peaceful, non-violent demonstration against Bush and his idea of permanent, pre-emptive war, is something that's absolutely natural," he said.
Mr Prodi, who pulled Italian troops out of Iraq after beating former centre-right leader Silvio Berlusconi in an election a year ago, has already had to face down leftist objections to the expansion of a US air base in Vicenza, northern Italy.
In February he resigned briefly after losing a vote in parliament over foreign policy due to objections from the left wing of his coalition over Italy's military role in Afghanistan.
Mr Bush, who will attend a Group of Eight (G8) meeting in Germany next week, is due to arrive in Rome on Friday and meet Mr Prodi and Pope Benedict XVI on Saturday.