Mark Zuckerberg’s honeymoon in Rome has quickly been added to the legend. The first evidence has been bouncing back on Twitter: it’s a picture that could have been taken by or of anyone. The Facebook founder was captured at the Sistine Chapel next to his newly-married wife Priscilla Chan, sporting an ever casual t-shirt and jeans.
The ingenius digital hero here seems engaged in the most conventional honeymoon ever. The man who recognized them was stunned that the newlyweds did not have a police escort. It seemed impossible that a billionaire like him would travel without a security detail, especially here in Italy where any lowly member of parliament is followed by at least three well-armed bodyguards when out shopping at Ikea.
During his quick holiday in Rome, Zuckerberg confirmed that he continues to carry himself in the high aesthetics of low-profile, not much different than when he was a penniless student in Harvard. Who knows if someone told him that for 2,000 euros, he could have had a private, guided tour of the Michelangelo masterpieces.
And so it is that the biggest prophet of sharing one’s private life with thousands of strangers enters, despite himself, through the back door of the media circuit, by way of a report on Facebook's biggest social network competitor: the more ascetic Twitter.
It looks even more ironic that the inventor of Facebook would be captured by a blurry picture of himself (and his wife) from behind, a sneaky snapshot taken with a smartphone, a circumstance that this time underlines a singularity. We could venture the hypothesis that all this could represent a strategy of anticipatory viral marketing. Yesterday, at the time when “the poor man’s paparazzi” pictures were going viral, press agencies were reviving the news, with The New York Times as a source, that Zuckerberg was secretly tooling up to launch the Facebook Smartphone, to be be on the market within a year.
But maybe the only real thing is that Mark Zuckerberg, the man who annihiliated the concept of anonymity, can afford to travel totally incognito. The height of absurdity is that the God of Faces has a face that not many notice -- indeed, only one guy armed with a cell phone approached him. You can bet that if any low-ranking showgirl had taken the same Roman “love tour” with her new hunk of a husband, she would have been followed by professional photographers, and wound up on the front pages of newspapers and magazines...rather than uploaded for a passing tweet.
Read the original article in Italian
Photo – Twitter
