[2] With the Italian Socialist Party, Strehler served as Member of the European Parliament between 1983 and 1984, representing North-West Italy.

Olimpio was one of the finest horn players of his day and the impresario of the Teatro Comunale Giuseppe Verdi, Trieste's Opera House.

He walked in for some relief from the weather to see a performance of Carlo Goldoni's Una delle ultime sere di Carnevale being given by a company from Venice.

A few days later, they staged Carlo Goldoni's long forgotten Arlecchino: Servant of Two Masters commedia dell'arte, which would go on to become the longest running play in Italian theater.

Instead, both Strehler and Grassi agreed that theater was "a place where people gather to hear statements that they can accept or reject".

His love for William Shakespeare (Coriolanus, The Tempest, King Lear, Twelfth Night, Macbeth), Luigi Pirandello (Enrico IV), and Anton Chekhov (The Cherry Orchard, Platonov) was unmistakable; he always returned to Goldoni repeating the same plays decades later.

Strehler used to say that "Italian theater has produced few important dramatic authors – Niccolò Machiavelli, Carlo Goldoni, Luigi Pirandello – but an enormous number of actors.

However he was given the Légion d'honneur by the French government and was named director of the "Union of the Theatres of Europe" in Paris in 1985, the first Pan-European theater project.

The stage designers Luciano Damiani and later Ezio Frigerio closely collaborated with Strehler for many years, both for theatrical and operatic productions.

Various aspects of his personality converge in his constant and single-minded attempt to build the necessary structures for a European theatre intended as a common workshop of new ventures and experiences.

Starting in the Piccolo Teatro di Milano, this determination eventually flowered into the foundation of the first really European theatrical organism, the Théâtre de l’Europe, which Strehler was called to direct.

Today Strehler's activities have expanded to even greater dimensions in the context of the transformation which our continent has undergone, and which theatre has done so much to promote.