Holland's murdered populist leader, Pim Fortuyn, was buried at the weekend in a quiet village cemetery in north-east Italy.
The funeral, in the village of Provesano where Mr Fortuyn owned a holiday home, was in marked contrast to the large-scale outpouring of grief which marked an earlier ceremony in Rotterdam attended by tens of thousands of his supporters.
Organisers expected 6,000 people to attend but only a tenth of that number, many of them curious locals and members of the press, turned up.
Mr Fortuyn was shot dead by an environmentalist extremist on May 6th as he was bidding for political power in the Netherlands with his recently founded rightwing party, the Pim Fortuyn List.
The party will provide four ministers in the new Dutch cabinet to be sworn in today. Mr Fortuyn, an avowed homosexual who campaigned to preserve Dutch traditions of tolerance and freedom, was an anomalous leader for the right. But his party gathered an astonishing level of popular support for its anti-immigration stand in less than a year of political campaigning.
The funeral in the parish church of Provesano was a low-key affair for someone renowned in life for flamboyance and extravagance. Pink and white roses were laid on the politician's white coffin, together with a smiling photograph.
No prominent politicians from either Italy or the Netherlands attended, leaving relatives and friends to recollect in tranquillity.
"We can't be tolerant with the intolerant," Mr Fortuyn used to say, to justify his criticism of Islamic fundamentalism, which he saw as a concrete menace to the liberal Dutch way of life.
"He was responsible for tearing down the wall of political correctness in Holland, which many people appreciated," said Aart Heering, a Dutch journalist who knew Mr Fortuyn and attended the funeral. "His followers were not political extremists."
Italy was perhaps an appropriate last resting place for the former Marxist turned right-wing militant. Anti-immigrant sentiment has swelled the ranks of Italy's right-wing National Alliance and the Northern League. But Mr Fortuyn rejected comparisons to France's Mr Jean-Marie Le Pen and Austria's Mr Jörg Haider, insisting that his was a battle in defence of Europe's tradition of tolerance.
His coffin was finally laid to rest in a large white marble tomb bearing his family crest and the Latin inscription "Loquendi libertatem custodiamus" (Let us defend freedom of speech).
"If he had become prime minister of Holland he would have been the first avowed homosexual to hold such an office," said Mr Franco Grillini, a Left Democrat MP and chairman of Italy's main gay organisation, Arcigay. "Not the first homosexual, but the first one to admit it."