Tourists, Tailors, and the Holy Spirit Descend on Vatican City ‘They are made cardinal, then they get fat,’ said the Vatican’s tailor. ‘I have to take their cassocks out, take their sashes out.’
Without a ruler since Pope Francis died, sleepy Vatican City has in a matter of days been reconfigured top to bottom. (Alberto Pizzoli/AFP via Getty Images)
VATICAN CITY — Pope Francis died at 7:35 a.m. local time on Easter Monday. Suddenly even Vatican waiters had turned conspiratorial. In a double-vaulted dining room just east of the Apostolic Palace, one leaned over a dessert menu to offer up a furtive trade: his list of the top papal candidates in exchange for this reporter’s. “I know things,” he said. “I know Cardinal Wako”—the John Paul II-appointed Gabriel Cardinal Zubeir Wako, archbishop emeritus of Khartoum, Sudan—“always orders a half-portion of lasagna.” And depositing a slip of paper and a ballpoint pen on the table below him, he gave a meaningful nod, and walked away. Without a ruler since Francis died, sleepy Vatican City has in a matter of days been reconfigured top to bottom. Now it is a humming maze of narrow, newly one-way streets, of checkpoints, barricades, drone-jamming guns, mounted police, military police, more than 60,000 mourners snaking in through this nearly half-kilometer-square sliver of a nation-state, of whispers, of rumors, of bets...
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