The meeting started late but nobody seemed to mind. Certainly, the music helped - Moby, Phil Collins, U2, Zucchero and Joe Cocker, to name but some.
Then, too, it also helped that despite consistently negative opinion poll predictions, centre-left leader Francesco Rutelli was determined to strut his stuff and make confident eve-of-election noises.
At the start of a weekend marked by bitter exchanges with centre-right leader Silvio Berlusconi, Italy's general election campaign stepped up a notch last Friday when the centre-left Ulivo coalition held its national convention.
Even before the centre-left leader formally opened the proceedings, however, one sensed the presence of his rival, Mr Berlusconi, all too clearly in the electoral air.
For a start, there was the little film with which the event opened. This featured Francesco Rutelli's "whistle-stop" electoral train tour of Italy last month. Accompanied by suitably soft music, we saw Mr Rutelli press a lot of flesh, meet leftwing icons, such as writer Umberto Eco and Nobel Prize winner Dario Fo, and pay homage at the memorial to those killed in the right wing terrorist bombing of Bologna train station in 1980.
The basic idea of the film was simple enough. This is our leader, an ordinary decent man mingling with the electorate, not shut up in his millionaire's castle outside Milan. No doubt, too, the film was a reflection of the US campaign influence in this election, given that the centre-left has hired members of Democrat Al Gore's campaign team while the centre-right has hired President Bush's advisers.
Beneath the US facade, however, one suspected the Berlusconi influence. Not only has the centre-right leader resolutely centred his coalition's campaign on himself but he has also refused a public TV debate with Mr Rutelli, on the grounds that Mr Rutelli is not so much a leader of the left as a "pretty face" sent out to "front" the "excommunist" campaign.
The idea that Mr Berlusconi was not far from Mr Rutelli's thoughts gained momentum when the centre-left leader took the podium.
Having outlined the centre-left's achievements in government over the last five years, he really warmed up only when he latched on to what is arguably the left's most touted electoral card, namely the "conflict of interests" between Mr Berlusconi the politician and Mr Berlusconi the media tycoon.
Pointing to a delicate decision the current government will soon have to take regarding car insurance premiums, he asked what would happen if Mr Berlusconi was in power. After all, among the portfolio of interests controlled by Mr Berlusconi's Fininvest Group is an insurance company, Mr Rutelli said, smiling.
At first glance, Mr Rutelli's concern seems legitimate. After all, does not Mr Berlusconi own the country's three largest commercial TV channels, not to mention a newspaper, magazines, a film company, the AC Milan football team and probably the Tower of Pisa as well?
That concern might seem more genuine, were it not that we heard it expressed seven years ago and again five years ago.
Many disillusioned would-be voters on the left ask, what have you done about it in the last five years. Answer, not much since we got involved in recruiting Mr Berlusconi's help as opposition leader in drawing up institutional and constitutional reforms, reforms on which Mr Berlusconi eventually pulled all the plugs. The net result was no reforms and a legacy of having played footsie.
In any other context, Mr Rutelli's good record as Mayor of Rome since 1993, his good looks, his intelligent presentation of himself and his programme (the centre-right has yet to present one) would give him an outstanding electoral chance.
In the context of the centre-left heritage of the last five years - tax hikes, public service cuts and austerity budgets, not to mention cosying up to Mr Berlusconi - he is fighting an uphill battle.
