VIPs avoid clash with 'last ladies'

Michelle Obama, Sarah Brown and 10 other "first ladies" toured the devastated heart of L'Aquila yesterday, seeing with their own eyes the city's earthquake damage.

But they kept well away from survivors - some calling themselves "the last ladies" - protesting that they are still forced to live in tents, more than three months after the disaster.

The group walked through the city's medieval centre, much of it reduced to heaps of rubble, before pausing outside the regional government headquarters which was almost flattened by the shocks.

The city centre has been closed to normal life since the disaster, still far too perilous for shops and offices to reopen: the experts and politicians are still debating how much can be saved and what to do about the rest.

The tens of thousands of the homeless were out of reach in tendopoli (tent cities) closed to outsiders. But they did their best to make their presence felt.

On a hillside overlooking the police college where the world's leaders were meeting, they had emblazoned a huge sign on the grass in English with the words "YES WE CAMP" - adapting US President Barack Obama's campaign slogan to advertise the fact that the "camping holiday" Berlusconi recommended to those made homeless by the disaster has never ended.

"We want to underline the fact that for the first time in earthquake history, people still haven't been relocated to temporary housing," one man said. "It was a clear Government choice to keep us in the tents and not to go through an intermediate phase."

A group of "last ladies" chanted, "Michelle, come to our tents, the women of Abruzzo await you in their underwear." One held a sign reading, "A stroll in the centre for the first ladies, for the women of Aquila only tents and cement." Michelle Obama was out of earshot.

- INDEPENDENT