ITALY: Ms Patrizia Filippa hugged a teddy bear and made believe it was her son. He was in a coffin at her feet. Both the teddy bear and her son were wearing the same uniform.
It was just one of the heart-wrenching scenes yesterday as tens of thousands of people filed by a row of coffins to pay tribute to 19 Italians killed last week in Iraq in the country's worst military loss since the second World War.
The small, brown teddy bear, wearing the uniform of the Carabinieri military police, was given to Ms Filippa by comrades of her son Andrea (31).
Members of the Filippa family, including his widow Monica, passed it to each other so it would always be on someone's lap.
The Filippas were just one family whose fears turned to tears on Wednesday when suicide bombers in the southern Iraqi city of Nassiriya blew up the Carabinieri base.
The blast sent the 19 Italians to the quiet Hall of Flags inside the marble Victor Emmanuel monument, where families and strangers were whispering their farewells to men who have been hailed as heroes.
The coffins, covered in the red, white and green Italian flag, will lie in state until this morning, when the dead will be accorded a national funeral expected to draw as many as a million people.
The crowds outside the massive, white marble monument, which also holds the tomb of the unknown soldier and Italy's eternal flame, began forming before dawn, hours before the hall was opened to the public.
While waiting patiently to enter, Tiziano Lucidi (12) held up a poster reading: "Farewell heroes. Your blood will help us write the word freedom."
Polls suggest that Italians are evenly split on whether the troops should stay in Iraq, as the centre-right government of Prime Minister Mr Silvio Berlusconi wants them to do.
Politics have taken a back seat to national mourning so far, but most people expect polemics to resurface shortly.
Inside the 100-metre hall, priests in black and volunteer nurses in white dispensed medical and spiritual comfort to the families.
Mgr Mauro Tramontano was one of the churchmen who had the task of informing mothers and wives all over Italy on Wednesday that their men would not return alive.
"I've been trying to be close to them. To give them comfort, hope, solidarity and a word of faith," he told Reuters outside the monument.
By afternoon the flowers on the 48 marble steps leading from the top of the monument grew downwards to the street.
It was so quiet at the intersection in front of the monument, usually Rome's noisiest intersection, that the water splashing from its twin fountains could be heard.