Paparazzi in Perugia

So….. we are now sheepishly willing to concede that there’s a slight possibility the man with the speed boat in Venice might not have been exactly who we thought he was (thank you everyone who sent sms’, emails and messages of disbelief, they are duly noted; as are the notes of support from those who saw what we saw!).
Still, we’re determined not to let one celebrity mis-spotting incident ruin it for everyone.
So, armed with our trusty point-and-shoot digicamera and buoyed by the knowledge and life experience of our ever resourceful visiting parental units, we set off one sunny day to try our luck on Perugia’s paparazzi trail and what do you know …...

Okay, okay, that’s not exactly what happened.
MnD met us in Perugia, where we have finally arrived, found a great little flat (after a bit of a disastrous false start – but that’s another story) and started Italian classes.
As a bit of an aside, let’s just be clear that we are at the bottom of what’s supposed to be the beginners two class.
In fact, sometimes we have to take turns giving each other little pep talks after class as our multi-lingual, almost overwhelming European classmates continue to pull further and further ahead of us, the lone native English speakers.
In truth we seem to spend much of the class shrugging our shoulders and trying, in vain, to puzzle out the recent past tense and possessive pronouns while our classmates move onto the future tense and complex sentences. (And we’d just like to take this opportunity to thank Mr Terry Metheral for allowing us NOT to learn grammar in primary school….. really helpful when you want to learn a new language).

But moving on...
To be honest, Italian class is pretty great and we are loving Perugia and had a load of fun with MnD before they left us to return to the luxury of Rhodes Waterside.
But something strange happened while they were still living it up at the Sangallo Palace here with us. Perugia fell ill with a very particular type of infection ….. “Il Boss” fever.
For those of you unfamiliar with this complaint, it can be described as a condition in which the entire town goes crazy for a certain American 80s singing sensation who made his name banging on about where he was born (that’s in the USA) and “Dancing in the Dark” with a future Friends’ star (that’s Courtney Cox-Arquette for any of you too old or two young – or just too smart – to have spent your formative years watching Video Hits every Saturday morning.)

Anyway, so for a while in Perugia it was all about Bruce Springsteen aka The Boss aka Il Boss when in Italy.
He performed in Perugia, at the local open air local athletic field no less.
We managed to listen to two songs (none of which were the two we knew) before we got a bit bored of it (you could hear, but not see it, from parts of the city).
And that would have been enough for us.
But our cup overfloweth because the very next day after the gig, we were going around our business (that’s drinking cappuccino or sipping the vino, we forget which) when MnD spotted a fan scrum (no media in sight) outside Perugia’s lone five-star hotel.
Alex took off with her camera, stuck her elbows out and pushed her way into the centre of the ruck from where she managed to get, amongst all the excitement, photos of the man himself.
Now, don’t tell us you are not excited about this.
And don’t tell us this isn’t Bruce Springsteen (although we weren’t entirely sure which one was the rockstar and which one was the bodyguard at first…. until we saw the goatee).
So there you have it, yet another piece of celebrity life captured by us. And you all thought nothing happened in Perugia!