ITALY: To the hypnotic Afro-Cuban beat of the multi-ethnic Piazza Vittorio band, centre-left opposition leader Romano Prodi officially put his election campaign on the road in Rome on Saturday.
With just six weeks to the vote, Mr Prodi promised an end to the "five-year-long winter" of Silvio Berlusconi's centre-right government.
With the most recent opinion polls giving Mr Prodi a 4 to 4½ point lead over his centre-right rivals, the atmosphere in Rome's Palazzo dello Sport was inevitably enthusiastic.
Perhaps influenced by Mr Berlusconi's successful, razzmatazz-style rallies, Mr Prodi's electoral send-off was bright and breezy, with comic sketches, video interviews and the Piazza Vittorio band interspersed amongst the speeches.
The only serious setback came when the audio system failed to work for the band led by comedian Maurizio Crozza.
As he waited for the technicians to fix the problem, Crozza joked: "We want to be careful here, let's not make a show of ourselves otherwise the Dwarf (Mr Berlusconi) will make the most of it."
In practice, last Saturday's rally marked the electoral send-off for Mr Prodi's "Ulivo" or Olive Tree coalition, an umbrella grouping which brings together some, but not all, of the 14 different parties which will fight the April 9th-10th election on the centre-left ticket.
An emotional moment came when former state president Oscar Luigi Scalfaro addressed the rally by video link, explaining just why he has led a successful campaign for a referendum which will ask Italians to reject the federalist, devolutionary reforms to the Italian constitution introduced by the Berlusconi government.
A key point, too, was provided by a statistical survey of five years of centre-right government which claimed not only that Italians now have less disposable income than in 2001, but also that the national debt has in the meantime grown at a time when the Italian economy has stuttered.
This particular analysis also drew attention to the fact that Mr Berlusconi's government found time to enact a whole series of so-called "ad personam" laws, designed to resolve his judicial problems.
Piero Fassino, leader of the largest party in the centre-left coalition, the ex-communist Democratic Left, argued that Mr Berlusconi has manifestly failed to maintain his promises of five years ago. Mr Fassino also spoke of the need to restore a "sense of legitimacy" in Italian public life.
Winding up the rally, Mr Prodi spoke of the need for Italians to "get Italy going again" and turn their back on the "moral decline, the arrogance, the vulgarity and the lies of public life under Mr Berlusconi.
The centre-left leader went on to express his solidarity with the judiciary who, even as he spoke, were coming in for fierce criticism from Mr Berlusconi.
Speaking at a Forza Italia rally in Milan on Saturday, Mr Berlusconi again accused magistrates of political bias in their investigations into his Fininvest empire.
Mr Prodi dismissed suggestions that his coalition will repeat the experience of his 1996-1998 government which was brought down when ultra-left electoral ally, Rifondazione Communista, voted against it.
Last autumn's centre-left primary and a series of inter-party workshops have resolved many internal coalition problems, he claimed.
Finally, commenting on a a recent survey which indicates that 55 per cent of Italians under the age of 35 would emigrate if they could, Mr Prodi concluded by saying that he hoped to convince them to stay on in Italy, an Italy which would be governed by the centre-left.