VATICAN CITY - The first mourners started staking out their positions Thursday a day ahead of Pope John Paul II's funeral, settling in for a night on the streets to secure the best vantage point.
Groups of people, many of them young, came armed with blankets and sleeping bags and camped down outside barriers leading onto Saint Peter's Square.
Friday's funeral, which starts at 10:00 am (0800 GMT), is set to draw state leaders representing more than half the world's nations as well as many of the two-to-four million pilgrims who have flocked to Rome this week.
Christof Kita, 18, and his 36-year-old brother Mirek spent 27 hours coming from Poland with the latter's wife and son, packing sleeping bags.
"There is an amazing atmosphere here, it's fantastic. We're sleeping on the ground, but we're happy," Kita said.
The four had traveled from Bielsko-Biala, 40 kilometers (25 miles) from the pope's home town of Wadowice in southern Poland.
"It's very important to be here," Mirek Kita said.
Earlier, waving flags, singing and sweltering in the sun, tens of thousands of pilgrims joined the final push to pay their respects before the pope's body lying in state in St Peter's Basilica.
Paul Bell, a trade union official from Drogheda, Ireland, who recalled the pope visiting the town in 1979, said the pope would be remembered for his work "for people who have no one to speak for them, for those without a voice."
"There was very little spin with him."
Gwen Williams, 70, one of three women from southeast England, said it was a "wondrous, lovely" occasion.
Her husband died earlier this year and her sister has cancer, she said. "I feel closer to my husband coming here and I'm praying for my sister too."
The masses were not on the scale of the suffocating crush of previous days when more than two million people had flocked to Rome, according to its mayor Walter Veltroni.
"It is as if Rome had hosted another Rome," the mayor of the city of three million told Vatican Radio.
"This is the biggest event in Rome in a century," municipal police colonel Zappia Esterino said Thursday. "Yesterday was a real emergency."
Roman and Vatican authorities have given varying estimates of the number of people, so far mostly Italian, who have arrived in Rome to see the body lying in state, but what is certain is that scores more trains and buses packed with pilgrims are arriving from across Europe to take part in Friday's funeral.
"He is the Jesus of our time," said Biedechristaline Ogiri, a Nigerian nun living in Rome as she queued up for a second time.
"He was a simple man, a humble man, a man of peace and love."
Cleaning crews struggled to clear mounds of debris, discarded water bottles, broken stools, old newspapers and scraps of clothing. Authorities said they had collected 30 tonnes of garbage from around the Vatican.
Police, soldiers and Italy's paramilitary Carabinieri worked overtime on crowd control in the Vatican neighborhood.
Units with explosive-sniffing dogs patrolled the area, and Rome's Prefect Achille Serra appealed to pilgrims planning to attend the outdoor funeral at the square not to bring bags or backpacks for security reasons.
In all, more than 10,000 security forces will be involved in the operation.
Jean-Herve Foulon, a 40-year-old French medieval history professor, said he, his wife, and two of their children had taken 15 hours to reach Rome and waited a further six in line.
"We wanted to pay homage to a man who was a saint. I think this is John Paul II's first miracle," he said, gesturing to the crowds.
The Vittorio Emanuele bridge over the Tiber river, which had been submerged under mourners Wednesday, was virtually empty early Thursday.
A village of media trucks, satellite dishes and television tents has been set up in front of Castel Sant'Angelo near the Vatican to bring live coverage of Friday's requiem mass to the outside world.
Makeshift stands have been built for the scores of television cameras and photographers looking onto the square.

04/07/2005 17:43 GMT