ROME (Reuters) - Forget a food summit in Rome that is tackling world hunger, forget the woes of carmaker Fiat, forget even the soccer world cup.
What Italy really has been abuzz about all week is the coming canonization of Padre Pio, a 20th century Italian mystic monk and miracle worker who for 50 years had the stigmata -- the bleeding wounds of Christ which doctors could not explain.
Padre Pio, who is said to have had the power to be in two places at once when he was alive, is now everywhere. His bi-location in life has become ubiquity in death.
Magazines and newspapers are full of articles about the man who wrestled with the devil in his monastery cell and predicted events in the lives of visitors.
Television shows have attracted some unlikely testimonials from people who say their lives were affected by Padre Pio -- including a few female sex symbols who do the talk show rounds to wax lyrical about sun tans one day and saints the next.
This Sunday, 24 years after Padre Pio's death, Pope John Paul will make him a saint at a Vatican ceremony expected to draw one of the biggest crowds ever to Rome.
So big are the expectations that Rome's largest square -- St. John's in Lateran -- has been drafted to handle the overflow from St. Peter's Square at the Vatican.
Padre Pio can be called the Babe Ruth of Italian saints. It's hard not to like him. He seems to offer something for everyone. And when the going gets tough, Italians look to him for a spiritual grand slam to help with illness or other woes.
Pictures of his bearded face are on taxi drivers' and bus dashboards all over Italy. They are taped on cash registers in bars, restaurants and clothing shops. They are in hospital wards and have even been found in the wallets of arrested Mafiosi.
One big hardware store in the Italian capital keeps a Padre Pio poster among the drill bits and the paint brushes and it seems like the most natural thing in the world.
Padre Pio devotees run from stars to street cleaners.
In a book called "VIPs Devoted to Padre Pio," movie stars like Sophia Loren tell how he affected their lives.
Known as the "living crucifix," the brown-robed Padre Pio spent nearly all of his life in a simple monastery in San Giovanni Rotondo in Italy's rugged southern Puglia region.
When he arrived in 1918, it was a dusty dot of a peasant village with a mule path. Today, it is the Lourdes of Italy, a pilgrim boomtown of 27,000 residents, a huge hospital which he founded, and some 7.5 million visitors a year.
Padre Pio's fame crosses generational lines in Italy.
Housewives in the south have developed the "Padre Pio Cake." It has a secret recipe. The preparation before baking must be done at exactly the same time each day for 10 days -- even if one prefers to do it in the middle of the night.
Children from the south have put together a play called "Ring Around the Rosy for Padre Pio." They plan to take it around Italy, a kind of off-off-Broadway of religious theater.
Some 150 biographies have been written about him in the past two years, just part of publishing ventures said to be worth about 25 million euros ($23.6 million) a year. And no one seems to be counting the number of Padre Pio CDs or Web sites anymore.
There is a Padre Pio postage stamp, a Padre Pio Television and Radio station, Padre Pio backpacks, Padre Pio pens, Padre Pio sweat shirts and even Padre Pio balloons.
The commercialism can be jarring and, perhaps, just perhaps, would test the patience of a saint.