Vatican City: Even with the gravity of death in the air, it’s hard not to marvel at Michelangelo’s dome, an impossible structure suspended above us like the sky itself had been poured into stone.

But today, it wasn’t the art or the grandeur of St Peter’s Basilica that held us. It was the man lying beneath it all.

Thousands of people wait before St Peter’s Basilica to see the Pope lying in state on Thursday.Credit: Flavio Brancaleone

Pope Francis, in death, looked exactly as he had tried to live – unadorned. There was no papal crown, no golden thread. Just a red chasuble, his white cassock, and the gentle crossing of his hands on his chest. His face was slackened by time, but unmistakably him.

The man who spoke of climate change as a moral crisis. The man who washed the feet of prisoners. The man who dared, within the great machinery of the Catholic Church, to simply ask for kindness.

More than 90,000 people had passed through by Thursday evening, the Vatican said, a day-and-a-half after the doors first opened. The basilica stayed open through the night on Wednesday to accommodate them, closing only briefly on Thursday morning, and was to stay open through the night on Thursday as long as mourners keep coming.

Inside at nearly 5pm, light spills in through the high windows, dancing across golden mosaics........

© The Sydney Morning Herald