Before Pope Meeting, Philly Delegation’s Italian Holiday

The Daily News reports on the visit of Mayor Nutter, Governor Corbett, and Archbishop Chaput to Rome to invite Pope Francis to Philly for 2015’s World Meeting of Families. The meeting itself doesn’t happen until Wednesday; that leaves time for a bit of fun:

Hours after arriving in Rome, the local delegation did a photo op outside the Pantheon for Philadelphia journalists who made the trip.

Reacting to the herd of camera crews following Mayor Nutter and Gov. Corbett, confused Italians and tourists crowded around and asked one another who the celebrities were.

Ever the politician, Nutter dived right in, greeting strangers as if they were potential voters at a campaign stop in Philly.

He ended up finding a couple from Gettysburg and posted a selfie with them on Twitter.

Selfie with a couple from Gettysburg, Pa outside the Pantheon! Incredible architecture and history! #PopeinPHL pic.twitter.com/xNgm7k9cmv

— Michael A. Nutter (@Michael_Nutter) March 24, 2014

NBC10 reports on the campaign back home:

Starting on Tuesday, Visit Philadelphia, the official tourism group for the city, will launch a social media campaign inviting the Pope to come to Philly in September of 2015 when the city hosts the World Meeting of Families.

Using the hashtag #PopeinPhilly, officials with Visit Philly hope the twitter campaign will play a role during Mayor Michael Nutter and Governor Tom Corbett’s meeting with the pope.

City officials say the September 2015 event could attract more than 1 million people from around the world and be the largest gathering in Philadelphia history.

NBC10 also interviews Everett Gillison, Mayor Nutter’s chief of staff, about the daunting task of preparing for such an event:

I’m pretty sure we can do it. The only thing that we always have to worry about is that the people remain flexible. We have to manage everyone’s expectations, both people in the city who are going to want to know that they’re still having their needs met while all these other people are coming around, so we have to manage our communications, we have to manage our flexibility with our responses to people and we also have to make sure people understand that this is a good thing for all of us. As the city’s statue continues to ride on a world-wide level, there’s challenges to it, but there’s a lot of positives.