Pride postscript

I forgot to mention that Rome council’s decision to forbid Gay Pride to wind up in Piazza San Giovanni looked more and more like an own goal yesterday afternoon. San Giovanni’s bigger than Piazza Navona, but it’s also well off the tourist/shopping route. Sending us through Piazza Venezia and the heart of the old city increased the visibility of the march tenfold. Even the fact that the entrance into Piazza Navona was narrow enough to create a bottleneck played into our hands. The only inconvenient aspect of the re-routing was that all those choristers who had an appointment in the Lateran Palace, the one that would have clashed with Pride (except that it wouldn’t), had to lift up their skirts and run all the way from Piazza Navona, along Via dei Fori Imperiali and Via Labicana and up the last bit of Via Merulana to make sure they didn’t miss their concert at half past eight. Sweet dreams are made of this.