political figure sighted in Venice

Egypt’s pavilion is on a sort of large island. Trying to cross the bridge back to the main area, I was stopped by a number of very serious Italian police with automatic weapons who told me to stay on the other side.

The Israeli pavilion is right on the other side of that bridge. Soon a flotilla of speedboats arrived. One of them was a curtained wooden craft with uniformed Italian security and presumably non-uniformed Israeli security as well.

Who could it be, I wondered? Netanyahu? Shimon Peres? Some lower-level cultural official from Israel? An Italian government official?

It was Shimon Peres, not 20 feet away from me. And he was immediately swarmed by a crowd of Israeli journalists as soon as he stepped out of the boat.