Locals gather for red wine spritz and conclave watch in a cardinal's hometown

SCHIAVON, Italy — Conclave watching turned out to be a perfect aperitivo activity.

Caffè Centrale, on the main drag of the Veneto hometown of Cardinal Pietro Parolin, a papal favorite, filled up with locals and journalists on Thursday. Three friends clinked their glasses in an Italian salute when the white smoke went up in St. Peter's Square.

''We hope it's him,'' said Mariano Vialetto, over an aperitivo in Caffè Centrale. ''We have our fingers crossed.''

Morgan Zaetta was more sure: ''It's him, it's him.''

A few moments later the bells rang in the church, St. Margherita — only the sacristan says it wasn't he who rang them and doesn't know who did.

''It wasn't me,'' said Angelo Cisotto, adding no one was in the bell tower and they could not be rung by remote. ''It's a mystery,'' he said. Asked if it could be a sign: ''We hope, we hope.''

All day, a large TV screen displayed images from St. Peter's Square and the chimney atop the Sistine Chapel, where 133 cardinals were casting the first votes for pope, as locals in the Veneto town of Schiavon, near Vicenza, quaffed glasses of wine.

The day before, Giacomo Bonora raised a glass of the local favorite, a red wine spritz, and said that when Parolin returns to the town of 2,600, he asks to be called by his local nickname: ''Don Piero.'' It's the way a parish priest would be addressed rather than ''eminence," a cardinal's honorific. Piero is the Veneto dialect for Pietro.

Parolin, 70, is a veteran diplomat who was Francis' secretary of state, essentially the Holy See's prime minister and No. 2 to the pope. Everyone is hopeful, but officials have been instructed not to speak to the media until a new pope is elected.

Cisotto, the 84-year-old sacristan, remembers Parolin as a child, 14 years his junior, and always devout. ''He used to dress up as an altar boy, and at home, in his garage, he had a little altar,'' where he would play saying Mass, Cisotto recalled. ''He is a very good, very humble and very kind person.''

As for Parolin's papal chances, 86-year-old Sebastiano Minuzzo said: ''This is a dream, but usually dreams don't come true."

Locals recalled that Parolin came regularly to Schiavon before his mother died last summer. His father died when he was 10, and he entered the seminary in nearby Vicenza at 14. For a period, he was a parish priest in the foothills town of Schio before joining the Vatican's diplomatic corps.

"He has such a mind, I can't grasp it,'' said Cisotto, the sacristan.

While closely associated with Francis' pontificate, Parolin is much more demure in personality and diplomatic in his approach to leading than the Argentine Jesuit he served — and he knows where the Catholic Church might need a course correction. Many see him as embodying Francis' pastoral message while being more open to conservative points of view. While his career has been spent in Italy, his job as a Vatican diplomat has seen him travel the world, giving him a global perspective.

If he were elected, he would return an Italian to the papacy after three successive outsiders: St. John Paul II (Poland), Pope Benedict XVI (Germany) and Francis (Argentina).