Italy: The United States government may choose to ignore its military dead in Iraq - not welcoming home the dead and banning the media from the receiving air base - but Italy yesterday chose to honour hers.Italy paid tribute to its war dead yesterday, Paddy Agnew reports from Rome.
The Italian state, government and people held a lavish and moving state funeral for the 19 Italians who lost their lives last week in a suicide bomb attack on an Italian military base in the southern Iraqi city of Nasiriya.
While the Bush administration seems to have forgotten a central part of the warrior's culture, namely the ability to face death squarely and honestly, Italians yesterday came together to pay full and handsome tribute to their dead on a national day of mourning.
All the major institutional figures in the country, from President Carlo Azeglio Ciampi to the Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi, joined the people of Rome to honour the dead in a dignified 1½-hour ceremony, held in the magnificent Basilica of St Paul Without The Walls and televised live nationwide.
Even by 10 a.m. on a brilliant sunny morning, fully 1½ hours before the state funeral was due to begin, both the Basilica and the area surrounding it were already crammed with more than 50,000 mourners. Italian tricolours flew from many of the windows along streets leading to the Basilica while billboards displayed the faces of all 19 dead with the simple words, "Rome Hugs You to Itself".
One young girl stopped to look at the poster, planting a handkiss on the face of one of the dead. She did not know him, she said, but she felt sorry for him.
He was a 30-year-old carabiniere, Mariesciallo Daniele Ghione, whose picture shows him in full dress uniform wearing a Napoleonic-era helmet, complete with feather, on the day of his marriage to Miriam, less than a year ago. Daniele was the only son of the Ghione family, from Finale Ligure, near Genoa.
Inside the crowded Basilica, the long wait was too much for some of the distressed relatives.
Monica Filippa, the young widow of 33-year-old carabiniere Andrea Filippa, kneeled for a long moment over her husband's coffin, stretching out her hand as if for one last touch. Slowly and quietly, she bent forward, finally resting her head on the coffin as she burst into tears.
All day long on Monday, Monica had clung to a little teddy bear, dressed up in carabiniere uniform, as she had sat vigil by her husband's coffin at the lying in state in the "Vittoriano", Italy's monument to national unity in Piazza Venezia.
Oblivious to the estimated half a million who passed by to pay their respects, she clung to the little bear, a gift from her husband's colleagues for the unborn child she is carrying, a child her husband will never know.
Presiding over yesterday's ceremony, the Cardinal Vicariate of Rome, Camillo Ruini, summed up the feeling of national loss that for a moment at least, seems to have brought Italians together.
"We will not run away from terrorist assassins," said the cardinal, "rather we will face them with all the courage, energy and determination we have.
"We will not hate the terrorists, rather we will try to make them understand that all Italy's best efforts, including military involvement in Iraq, are intended to promote and safeguard co-existence amongst men and women in which there is space for every people, culture and religion."
Even if Italian public opinion was overwhelmingly opposed to the US-led military intervention in Iraq, a vast majority of those listening to Cardinal Ruini outside the Basilica yesterday applauded loudly when he spoke of "facing" the terrorists.
Even louder and more sustained applause greeted the reading out of the names of the dead, while those watching the ceremony outside on giant TV screens applauded warmly and repeatedly every time the cameras focused on the 19 tricolour-draped coffins lined up in front of the altar.
Many of those gathered around the Basilica followed the service closely, joining in all the prayers and responses. Even those who did not, however, were quiet and subdued. When a carabiniere bugler sounded out Il Silenzio (The Last Post), before the benediction of the dead, an eerie, almost total silence reigned.
To the accompaniment of Chopin's Funeral March, the coffins were finally carried out of the Basilica, prompting the crowd to break into a 10-minute sustained applause that was interrupted only by the occasional shout of "Viva L'Italia".
Guards of honour from the carabinieri, the army, the navy, the air force and the president's own mounted corazzieri stood to attention as the coffins were loaded into the hearses.
Fully two kilometres from the Basilica, the streets were still lined with people, many of whom made the sign of the cross as the funeral cortege moved slowly past. Many of the coffins were directed to Rome's military airport, Ciampino, since all 19 dead will be buried in their own villages and towns, stretching from Sicily in the south to Friuli-Veneto in the north.
Among those watching the funeral cortege move off were a group of 17- and 18-year-old students from a secondary school in Palestrina, just outside Rome. They were brandishing a football stadium-type banner, bearing the words, "Your Hearts Were Big, You Are Our Heroes".
Asked why they had wanted to travel to the funeral and display their banner, one of the students, Luca, said simply: "It's just a gesture. We wanted to say thanks".
Two huge masses of flower wreaths, one in front of the Basilica of St Paul's and the other at the Vittoriano, testified to the desire of thousands of other Italians to also make "a gesture".
Those wreaths, too, with their echo of the outpouring of popular emotion that marked the death of Princess Diana in Britain, say much about the unexpectedly strong impact of these deaths on Italian public opinion.
Among the wreaths piled up outside the Basilica, there was one labelled, "From five 15-year-olds". Handwritten not too clearly on a piece of paper torn from a copybook, it said: "We had hoped only for solutions in Iraq. We just hope that your deaths were not in vain."