ROME -- President Sergio Mattarella and Premier Giorgia Meloni were among the first people to visit the lying in state of pope emeritus Benedict XVI in St. Peter's Monday.
Mattarella said the ex-pope, who died on New Year's Eve aged 95 after becoming the first pope in 600 years to abdicate in February 2013, was an "extremely luminous testimony of the Gospel" after his death.
Meloni also paid tribute to the eminent theologian and religious intellectual on Saturday saying he was "a giant of faith and reason".
The body of the former pontiff, who was the first German pope in a thousand years, will lie in state for three days, until his funeral led by his successor Pope Francis on Thursday, January 5.
Benedict stepped down on February 11, 2013 with a bombshell announcement that was scooped by ANSA thanks to Vatican correspondent Giovanni Chirri.
The man born Joseph Ratzinger who had taken over from Polish pope Saint John Paul II on April 19, 2005, was once dubbed 'God's Rottweiler' in his previous role as the Vatican's doctrinal enforcer, and after first embracing Vatican II's liberal reforms became one of the staunchest defenders of orthodoxy and tradition in the Catholic Church, having witnessed shocking attacks on churches in his native Bavaria during the late 1960s.
As prefect of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, he made proponents of South America's Marxist-inspired liberation theology bow down to Vatican authority and recant, eventually snuffing out the movement that had been rooted in a quest for social justice.
As pope, he reverted to his mild and cerebral nature and struggled to keep a firm hand on the papacy as it was rocked by clerical sex abuse scandals.
He was the first pope to meet with victims of abuse, which he had damned as "filth".
But Benedict was accused by victims of not doing enough to stamp out abuse, and was recently himself accused of inaction on predator priests as a bishop in his native Germany.
Benedict's papacy was not spared of perceived missteps such as the occasion in which he quoted a historical emperor as saying Islam's spreading the faith by war was evil, a statement that forced him into an embarrassing U-turn after he made the remarks at Ravensburg in 2006.
He also angered Jews across the world by rehabilitating an ultra-orthodox Catholic group and a version of the Mass, in Latin, which called for the conversion of the Jews and implied they had been guilty in the death of Jesus.
He also once proclaimed the superiority of Christianity over other religions and never swayed from his belief that it was the one true faith.
But to Catholic conservatives, he was a beacon of hope in a world that was becoming increasingly plagued by relativism, or the belief that all creeds and philosophies and thinking merited the same status.
After the election of the more progressive Francis, conservatives still looked to Benedict as a symbol of their older and more traditional outlook.
Benedict was one of the most acclaimed theologians of his generation and wrote a series of influential books.
He was also a man of reason and culture and loved reading, writing and listening to classical music.
His last words after he succumbed to respiratory problems on Saturday morning were reportedly "I love you, God".
Benedict's papacy was also rocked by longstanding problems at the Vatican Bank, the Institute for Religious Works (IOR), and his last years were overshadowed by his butler leaking documents about clerical infighting and alleged corruption at the IOR.
But supporters say his legacy will live long as one of the most influential popes in terms of his refined and exalted teachings. (ANSA)
