Brush with Power, Part II

A mere week after my close encounter with Silvio Berlusconi, the Don Juan of Italian politics, I was lucky enough to happen across the path of another very large police cavalcade at just the right time. I was waiting for a bus to the Vatican when I heard the sirens. It is very easy to distinguish between the siren sound made by an ambulance and the siren sound made by a Carabinieri motorbike, and thus easy to decide whether to feel grave or excited when you hear one.

This was definitely the excited kind of siren, and there were an awful lot of them, according to my less and less useful eardrums. Fortunately, Italian drivers, once they are in their vehicles, are not impressed by anything that holds up traffic, no matter if it is Sofia Loren, a horrible accident, or a giraffe. To the drivers, all of these have one thing in common: they are making us late! So, the cavalcade didn't get as much room on the street as they would have liked, as the traffic going the opposite direction continued to do so as if everything were normal. Due to this bottleneck, the 4 cars of the cavalcade had to pass by us waiting at the bus stop slowly enough that we could see who was inside.

What with the story being all over the news and the sheer number of cars being escorted by the police, we could all guess who was inside, and were not disappointed to see the glamorous wives of the G8 leaders (and Angela Merkel's husband, we shouldn't leave him out). The only people who were missing are generally the only two that people can name: the outrageously stylish Carla Bruni, first lady of France, and from my home country, Michelle Obama. Apparently, they are too cool to come to Rome with all the other G8 spouses; from what I can gather from the Italian news on RAI (where apparently you are only hired if you can deliver the entire news in less than a minute), Ms. Bruni will be going straight to L'Aquila to examine the effects of April's devastating earthquake (she was born and raised in Italy, in fairness), and Michelle Obama will be here at some indefinite later point.