ROME, Nov. 17 — The sight was extraordinary, but less so than the sound, or rather the lack of it. Although thousands upon thousands of people filled one of this city's most chaotic squares during the evening rush hour on Monday, the decibel level seldom rose above a whisper's.
Silence was just one way in which those people sought to show their respect for 19 Italians killed in a suicide bombing in Iraq last week. Another was to wait two to three hours, in the drizzle and dark, for a chance to walk past the victims' coffins, arrayed inside a palace that towers over the square, Piazza Venezia.
The line went on and on, just like Italy's mourning.
This country's reaction to the casualties it suffered in the attack has been more than a modest, fleeting sob.
For days on end, Italy's leaders have delivered public statements as sweeping as soliloquies. Newspapers have been jammed with essays about slain heroes, and television reports have been filled with crying.
But perhaps more striking, this outpouring of emotion has not been accompanied by a significant swell of protest over the Italian government's decision, after the fall of Baghdad, to send several thousand Italian police officers, soldiers and civilians to Iraq.
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Over the weekend, an Italian official, Marco Calamai, resigned from the American-led administration running Iraq. Mr. Calamai was quoted by the Italian daily Corriere della Sera as saying, "The provisional authority simply doesn't work."
But in a country where a majority of people opposed the American-led invasion of Iraq, any demands for Italian military forces to be removed from Iraq have been scattered and muted — at least so far.
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Italy is also a country in which regionalism often trumps national identity, but since Wednesday, the Italian flag has suddenly sprouted in the windows of many apartments. Italians have talked with pride about the sacrifice made by a whole nation.
That tone reflects the scale of their loss, which stunned them. The bombing represented the deadliest single attack on Italian armed forces abroad since World War II, Italian officials said.
But the country's response also reflects the Italians' emotionalism. By about 8 p.m. on Monday, tens of thousands of had come to Piazza Venezia to see the coffins inside the gargantuan white monument to Victor Emmanuel II, the first king of a united Italy.
The steep, broad outdoor staircase that they scaled was covered by the flowers they brought: hundreds of bouquets that formed a rainbow-colored carpet, so deep and dense it could be seen at least a quarter of a mile away.
