Journalists covering the annual Group of Eight summit for the first time don't have the same frame of reference as old G8 hands, but even we suspected something was awry when we learned that we would be staying a two-hour bus ride away from the venue.

Hundreds of us are billeted in apartments at an athletic village built to house participants in the just-ended Mediterranean Games held in somewhat nearby Pescara on the Adriatic coast.

The set of cheap and cheerful public housing blocks -- still with quite a bit of landscaping yet to do -- are glorified with names like Bernini, Michelangelo and Tintoretto.

Even stranger than Pescara is the summit venue itself, outside the crippled city of L'Aquila that is still mourning the 299 people who lost their lives in an earthquake that struck on April 6.

The entire city of 70,000 remain evacuated from the disaster, many still living in tent camps dotted around the region three months on.

People familiar with Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's woes, both public and private, have to wonder what really motivated the decision to shift the summit venue from a luxury cruise ship off of La Maddalena, a Sardinian island, to a disaster zone. He said it would save money and draw attention to the earthquake victims' plight, but you have to wonder whether the sympathy he seeks is for his own embattled self.

Buffeted by relentless revelations over his well-known penchant for starlets, the 72-year-old Berlusconi uses every opportunity to appear the statesman, as well as to deflect attention from Italy's nose-diving economy. So he seized on the idea of money better spent on rebuilding L'Aquila and moving the whole G8 show to a drab military barracks in a suburb of the quake city.

This inspired the unusual G8 slogan, "From La Maddalena to L'Aquila," which features on a logo suggesting a world traversed by migrating blue turtles. Huh? Is the idea that we, too, have migrated to the new venue? Whatever.

Ever since Berlusconi made the surprise announcement of the venue switch he has tried to allay concerns over the fact that aftershocks continue to rattle the area, the biggest so far measuring 5.1 on the Richter scale. So the G8 organisers came up with a plan to place a fleet of helicopters on standby to evacuate the summiteers to an alternative venue in Rome in case of a tremor of 4.0 or more.

Just a day or two before the summit opened, authorities announced that it would be cancelled altogether if that happened. A G8 summit cancelled? Go figure.

It's no wonder, then, that on Wednesday when Berlusconi met the world's press on the opening day he made short work of it. Inviting questions at the end of his spiel, he didn't skip a beat before deeming there were none, despite a number of raised hands.

The flamboyant premier stuck around long enough to share a parting nugget of information with us. A "very, very special" statue dating from the fourth century BC has pride of place in the G8 conference hall, he said, adding that it is securely mounted on an earthquake-proof pedestal.

Dolling up the Guardia di Finanza cadet training school and barracks clearly took a lot of money and effort, paint and grass sodding. Berlusconi claimed the cadets' digs had undergone a "miracle" transformation and invited us for a look in. Not. The road leading to the venue is sparkling, with roundabouts featuring G8 floral patterns.

All the prettifying has not been lost on the quake refugees. "The road on which all these world leaders are going to arrive in L'Aquila has been resurfaced, but we may still not be able to return home until September or October," one survivor fumed.

In this blog, reporters and editors for global news wire AFP blog about the news they report and the challenges they face covering events from Baghdad to Beijing, the White House to Darfur. Gina Doggett reports for AFP from Rome.