Good game, good game. Even the Italian commentators are calling him Roonaldo now. They love the way he does things like bomb the whole length of the pitch just to chase down the keeper. Vieri only moves that fast when he thinks his hairdresser is about to close. La Gazzetta gave him 8.5 out of 10 for his performance, which is an incredibly high score. The only time they ever gave any player 10 was when a goalkeeper saved the life of an opposition striker with mouth to mouth resuscitation after he was knocked out cold and stopped breathing...

An Italian story: In the monastery at San Fruttuoso, just down the coast from here, there is a copy of a sculpture called "Cristo degli abissi" - you might translate it as 'Christ of the perished'. The original, made in bronze about 50 years ago, is placed out in the sea, immersed under about 15 metres of water. Here it stands as a monument to all those who lost their lives at sea. The statue is famous and is even marked on my map of Italy. Divers make pilgrimages to it.

So, this being Genova's year as European Capital of Culture, the statue was brought out of the water for a clean and placed for a few weeks in a little room just of Piazza de Ferrari for people to look at. I went myself two weeks ago, there were maybe a couple of other people there too, to look at the statue and see the film of it being pulled out of the water. Then, last Thursday, a strange and very Italian thing happened. A woman went to see the statue and thought she could see a suffering face on its chest. It couldn't be the face of Jesus on a statue of Jesus, so it must be, of course, the face of Padre Pio. Headline boards outside paper stands on Friday declared 'Padre Pio appears in Piazza de Ferrari!' and the next day, at least 3000 pilgrims arrived to queue up to look at the statue. Companies all over Italy started laying on coaches to bring the Padre Pio followers over to Genova, and fast, because in a few days the statue is being returned to the sea.

What can you say? One man interviewed in the paper said, 'it's like looking for faces in the clouds', but another said 'I believe!', and the man who made the sculpture apparently believes too..