Thousands queue to view Pope lying in state

Tens of thousands of people waited for hours today for the first public viewing of Pope John Paul’s body, shielding themselves from the blistering sun with umbrellas as they prepared to pay their final respects in the Vatican.

Civil protection crews handed out bottles of water to help pilgrims keep cool as they waited for John Paul’s remains to be brought down from the Apostolic Palace into St Peter’s Basilica.

After a prayer service, the basilica was to open its doors for public viewing - and was to stay open overnight for the rest of the week to accommodate the estimated two million people expected in the coming days.

The Vatican announced that John Paul would be buried on Friday in the grottos of St Peter’s after a funeral expected to draw heads of state from around the world.

Donato Guida and his wife Teresa Franco were among the first few thousand people who lined up for the viewing, after having travelled all night by train from the southern Italian city of Lecce. Franco had been overwhelmed by the sun and they were shading themselves on the side of the broad Via della Conciliazione, which was crowded with pilgrims fenced in by police barriers.

“He left such a pain in our hearts,” said Guida. “We’d like to see him,” he said.

Uwe Kunzmann, a civil engineer from Karlsruhe, Germany, had no expectations he would get into the basilica, but was content to be among the crowd for such an important event.

“It’s extraordinary. It happens once in a lifetime,” he said. “We want to be in the crowd.”

Inside St Peter’s Square itself, impromptu memorials sprang up, with street lamps covered in flowers, icons and hand-written messages pinned up with multicoloured candle wax.

One note, which carried a recent photo of John Paul lifting his hands to bless the faithful and a small Nigerian flag, read: “Pope John Paul II, we love you. May your gentle soul rest in perfect peace. Amen!!”

Pinned up among pictures of saints and rosaries were messages written on train tickets or pieces of tissue, while flowers poked out from of the holes of the iron lamp posts that stand around an obelisk in the centre of the square.

Among them were farewell notes and children’s drawings. ”Goodbye, father, hero, friend,” said one letter, written in red in a childlike hand.

“We thought it was right to come because he has always loved us young people, and we want to pay back what he has done for us,” said Monica Favalli, who arrived from northern Italy in a group of 50 to pay her respects to the Pope.

Overnight, a few people slept under the colonnade surrounding St Peter’s, and a group of Polish faithful huddled around their country’s flag in the square as they stubbornly kept vigil for a third consecutive night.