A Brush With Soccer Royalty

Alessandro Del Piero and Juventus again take center stage in Turin with the Olympics over. (By Massimo Pinca -- Associated Press)

They massed around the bus as if Bono and the Edge were on board. Women, children, volunteers. Old. Young. A cornucopia of Italian culture, trying to catch a glimpse of their great sporting gods, snapping photos, yelling well-wishes.

You thought maybe it was Italy's Bode, underachieving Alpiner Giorgio Rocca. No? Enrico Fabris, the Horatio Alger of Italian speedskating? Uh-uh? All right, IOC pooh-bah Jacques Rogge?

"No," says Vittoria Pascole, a manager at the Verolengo Village Hotel. "It is Juventus. They stay here last night. Do you know Del Piero?"

Alessandro Del Piero. Juventus. The great Italian soccer team and its star player. At our hotel. Of course. Italy's full-time athletic heroes were back. Time for the Winter Games to end. On to more important sporting matters in the Old World.

-- Mike Wise

Service With a Smile

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Shopping in Turin has been the highlight of everyone's Olympics, if all the giant bags being hauled in and out of the Main Media Center are any indication.

It's not just the designer clothing, the Murano glassware, the fabulous Italian eyeware. It's the way the shopkeepers treat their customers, whether you buy a nine-euro pendant or half the store.

My friend Michelle Kaufman and I found a terrific glass store on Via Po, the Venexia a Torino. We walked into a huge array of glassware, practically drooling. The owner approached and asked if we wanted to see the back room. Silly man; http://of%20course/ we did! It was chock-full of Murano, exquisite pieces, fun pieces. While we exclaimed over everything we saw, he told us he was the fourth generation of his family to own the store. Returning to the front counter, he showed us a photo of his great-grandfather, grandfather and his father, just a baby in the picture. He was clearly proud of the family business and he had every right to be.

Then the real eye-opening experience began. We each bought a http://lot/ of gifts, and one of the owner's assistants began wrapping them, one by one. Bubble Wrap, special boxes, wrapping paper, ribbons. I asked her not to wrap several things because, well, they weren't gifts, and she was disappointed. All this with a line of customers waiting to be helped. And this was not special treatment; this is what they do for all of their customers.

I assumed that the wrapping was a special feature of this friendly, family-owned business. I could not have been more wrong. We stopped at a coffee shop that was selling "gold medals" -- large discs of chocolate, wrapped in gold foil, with a blue ribbon for hanging them around your neck -- and small stuffed animals. The shop was packed and there was a line at the single cash register. To my astonishment, despite the crowd, the woman behind the counter placed my purchase in a foil bag. Then she tried several colors of ribbon until she found a good match, and tied the bag shut. Then she took a pair of scissors and curled the ribbon. http://then/ she hunted for a sticker to hold the ribbon down. It was like the scene from "Love Actually" when Rowan Atkinson wrapped a gift for Alan Rickman. (Although that was an expensive necklace, and no one was waiting in line behind Rickman.) She put that foiled-wrapped bag into http://another/ bag, so that the wrapping wouldn't get smashed, and presented it to me with a smile.

All that was missing was the cinnamon stick.

-- Tracee Hamilton