The venue is a military academy, a mess of drab, grey buildings on the outskirts of L'Aquila, the capital of the central Abruzzo region that bore the brunt of a killer earthquake in April.

The training school for Italy's militarised revenue police, the Guardia di Finanza, "is the likely venue for an austere G8," according to the official website of the July 8-10 summit to focus in particular on the global financial crisis.

Conservative Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi shifted the venue to the earthquake zone from the Sardinian island of La Maddalena, where summiteers were to have held talks aboard a luxury cruise liner.

Making the surprise announcement some three weeks after the April 6 earthquake, Berlusconi said the move would "show solidarity" with the victims.

Staging the meeting at La Maddalena would have cost some 220 million euros (300 million dollars), money that could be better spent on rebuilding the L'Aquila region, he argued.

"It won't be a classic 19th-century palace like in Naples or Genoa, or on a ship with a beautiful view of the sea, unfortunately," said Yuri Pittaluga, a civil protection press officer, referring to two earlier G8 summits during previous Berlusconi governments.

Neither carries fond memories for Berlusconi -- the 1994 Naples meeting was clouded by a corruption scandal that soon brought down his first government, while the 2001 Genoa meeting was the scene of massive, violent riots.

Memories from Genoa also spurred the shift as planners reasoned that anti-globalisation activists would think twice before bringing massive protests to a disaster zone.

The academy, built in the 1980s and '90s, was practically untouched by the April 6 disaster that claimed 295 lives, but even in the conference room where Pittaluga was speaking, plaster was falling off the walls.

The G8 delegations -- plus those of 14 emerging nations and several international organisations -- will be billeted in the academy's barracks for married cadets.

Journalists planning to cover the summit, however, might well consider bringing their own tents.

Under current plans, the press corps is expected to shuttle to and from the venue from Chiete, some 90 kilometres (55 miles) away.

"The Olympic Village they are building in Chiete for the (June 26-July 5) Mediterranean Games (in nearby Pescara on the Adriatic coast) will house 7,000 athletes, so there will be enough room for the G8 journalists," Pittaluga said.

Those journalists who would prefer to be closer to the action can rule out finding a hotel in L'Aquila -- the city is a "red zone", closed to all but qualified workmen and private builders with special passes.

Five weeks before the G8 summit, no hotels are open within a half-hour radius of L'Aquila, the epicentre of the earthquake that turned the city into a ghost town.

Some 58,000 people remain homeless from the disaster.

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