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I have been astonished at the amount of column inches written about the Pope's death. Here in Naples, the papers informed me that thousands of people went to Piazza Plebiscito to watch the funeral on a maxiscreen, all the shops shut and the streets were silent. Just to put things on a more truthful level, some shops closed, the streets were their usual bustling selves and as one of the hundreds in Pzza Plebiscito I can honestly say the papers are lying through their teeth.
Today, more worryingly than hyperbole and exaggeration, the Pope's secretary has declared that the Pope already managed a miracle while still alive. Apparently, a wealthy Jew was cured of cancer after talking to John Paul some years back. I didn't read on to find out if he promptly converted to Catholicism, or even if he connects the two events in the same way as the Pope's private secretary has managed to do. This headlong scramble to make the man a saint is just going to make the church into a laughing stock. In a year's time when people look back on his papacy objectively, perhaps they will see that merely being Pope for a long time doesn't qualify His Holiness for automatic sainthood. Support for reactionary, quasi militaristic branches of the Church is also low on the list of requirement for beatification. Strange that out of the 2500 members of the clergy at the funeral, 5 were women. A handful of nuns showed all that JP did for women in the last 25 years.

Otherwise it's business as usual in Naples. With the elections over, the posters have been replaced with new ones, each candidate thanking the electorate for their votes. By the time these are taken down, it will be time for the next election and the whole process will start again.