FOR THOSE of us who were here three months ago for the mass funeral of the earthquake victims, it was hard to recognise the place. The finance police barracks in Coppito, outside L’Aquila, site of the G8 Summit this week and of the state funeral then, has been totally transformed.
As you get bused in, the first thing you notice is the pristine quality of the fresh tarmac. Likewise, where there was just a dirty, dusty turn in the road, now there is a spanking new roundabout, complete with immaculate, overnight lawn and fresh flowers.
In the Coppito centre itself, the water lorries have a full-time job, not quenching anyone’s thirst but trying to keep the acres of lawn looking at least partially green until the end of the week. If you did not know better, you might conclude the whole place functions as some sort of giant, latter-day Butlins holiday camp.
For a start, there is the huge, semi-open restaurant area where hungry hacks can eat their fill and, what is more, do so for free. Prime minister Silvio Berlusconi has had his problems with the media in recent months, especially pesky foreign media merchants, so he and his staff came up with a perfect strategy. Give them a decent meal and maybe they will give him some good press. Maybe, maybe not.
It was a day for a lot of walking around in the very warm sun. After all, the “holiday camp” inmates, Messrs Obama, Sarkozy, Berlusconi, Merkel, Medvedev etc, are based here in the barracks. There is no running away to a five-star hotel or an exclusive embassy residence at the end of the day. Here all the rooms have been equipped with a bed, a TV, some basic furniture and little else.
When Berlusconi made the unexpected decision to switch this G8 from La Maddalena in Sardinia to L’Aquila, part of the reasoning was that this would become a more sombre summit, better-suited to dealing with the problems of world governance such as combating hunger and the global economic recession. For that reason too, the delegates’ families are having themselves a bit of a Roman holiday.
Or so it seemed yesterday, as Michelle Obama took the kids, Malia and Sasha, for an ice-cream in Giolitti’s, just about the most famous ice-cream parlour in the Eternal City.
Other First Ladies, wives of Indian, South African, Mexican and UK leaders, took the opportunity to drop in on Pope Benedict XVI.
The pontiff told the ladies, who were accompanied by glamorous equal opportunities minister Mara Cafagna and education minister Maria Stella Gelmini, that he hoped the G8 Summit would be able to do something “to help Africa”.
Today business gets a bit more serious for the First Ladies as they (and many of their consorts) take a first-hand look at the devastation effected by an earthquake that claimed 297 lives.
German chancellor Angela Merkel set a good example yesterday and visited Onna, a village close to L’Aquila where 41 of the 300 residents died, and a town which was also the site of a 1944 Nazi massacre. The chancellor confirmed previous pledges of German funding for the rebuilding of Onna.
Later, a shirt-sleeved Obama also took a tour of the damaged city of L’Aquila.
And the earthquake victims themselves? As we pulled into the journalists’ car park, activists handed us leaflets with the inscription, “Yes we camp, but we don’t go away” in reference to the fact that some 22,000 people are still living in tented villages.
The activists want to highlight “the total inadequacy of the way the post-earthquake emergency has been handled”.
One suspects, however, that down at “Butlins” they have other priorities and concerns.