Italophile

Hey internet – nice to see you again!

I’ve been away on a trip up north (Bologna and Venice – good cities, more on that later. Well, maybe) and busy with thrilling stuff like babysitting and Italian class, but I wanted to write a little something about Bush’s visit before it got too stale.

So, Bush has decided to make his farewell tour of Europe (and I thought “Old Europe” was unimportant..) and, of course, he decided to drop and see his old pal Berlusconi. We started hearing rumors that he was coming up to visit the American Academy on Wednesday night, but they seemed kind of speculative. But, lo and behold, Thursday morning there are police all over the damn place and it turns out he’s going to the Villa Aurelia (which owned by the American Academy and just up the street from the main building. I babysat for a family who lives there last week, natch).

There was a bit of drama because some of the Fellows at the Academy had made and hung some (pretty tame) anti-Bush signs. The police tried to get the Academy to take them down so Bush could drive by unpreturbed, but Pia, the valiant general manager of the Academy, stood them down and the banners stayed up. So, of course, they re-routed the motorcade, lest the President be offended by the “Basta Bush” sign (odds he would know what that means anyway: somewhere around zero). Anyway, here are some pictures:

I didn’t have the patience to stick around until he got there, but my mother did, and reports that a few of the Fellows from the Academy did some yelling as the car passed, but it was generally pretty sedate. Apparently, though, some reporter from an Italian paper ran up to them afterwards and asked them if they could repeat the whole yelling thing cause she didn’t quite catch it.

I was wandering around the center of the city (on Corso Vittorio Emanuele) and around noon his motorcade passed by. Long and loud, I’ll give it that much. Anyway, the whole day I didn’t run into any protesters. Most people just seemed a little pissed that he was screwing up traffic patterns and making so much noise with his helicopters. When I was here in 2004 and Bush visited there were immense protests. So I guess the NYT kind of gets it right on this one.