Rome at that hour belonged to the bakers and the delivery drivers and the elderly men who had been waking before the sun for so long they'd forgotten they had a choice.
Shop shutters were still closed, café owners were setting out chairs, and the smell of fresh bread was just finding its way onto the streets.
Here and there, the city's earliest regulars moved through their routines without hurry, until a different sound drifted across the quiet.
It started as a distant tremor before growing into something impossible to ignore.
People looked up from newspapers, paused outside bakeries or turned from bus stops as a long line of men ran through the streets.
A woman on the second floor of a building on Via Lungo heard it and moved to the window and looked down and then looked again.
Because what was moving through the street below her was a group of men in blue training tops, the embroidery on the chest catching each eye as they passed.
