`on history's clock, an important hour has struck. At this very moment, the year 2000 is beginning, a year that leads us into a new millennium. For the faithful, this is the year of the great Jubilee. Happy New Year to you all. Happy New Year to you all, men and women from every corner of the earth.
"As we cross the threshold into the New Year, I would like to be able to knock on all your doors to express to all of you my best wishes. Happy New Year to all of you, bathed in the light that beams out from Bethlehem over the entire universe. I wish you all a year rich in peace, rich in the peace announced by the Angels on the Holy Night . . ."
It is not often that Pope John Paul II is upstaged but as he stood at his window in the Apostolic Palace looking out on to a packed St Peter's Square, even he must have wondered if things would ever quieten enough to allow him give the above New Year's Eve greeting, seconds after midnight. The bells of St Peter's rang out long and loud to the accompaniment of fireworks as the 130,000-strong crowd clapped and cheered in the New Year, in anticipation of the first ever midnight "Urbi et Orbi".
For most of those in the square, the Pope was but a distant white dot vaguely visible above the only lighted window sill along the side of the Apostolic Palace that opens on to St Peter's Square. Millions of TV viewers, however, saw the tired and frail Pope wait patiently for the cheering, the bells and the fireworks to stop before he leaned forward into the microphone (extra-amplified for the night) to deliver his address.
For the ailing, 79-year-old Pope, this has been an extremely busy Christmas and New Year period, begun on Christmas Eve with a three-hour long religious servicecum-pagaent in which he symbolically acknowledged the beginning of the Holy Year by opening a special "Holy Door" in the antrium of the Basilica of St Peter's. Prior to his midnight "Urbi et Orbi", he had already presided over the 1 1/2-hour long traditional "Te Deum" prayer service of New Year's Eve.
On the morning of New Year's Day, while most of Rome was still sleeping off the effects of the late-night celebrations, he made his way across Rome to the Basilica of Mary Major for a 9 a.m. service that marked the opening of yet another symbolic Holy Door. Three hours later, the Pope was delivering his customary New Year's Day Angelus and "Urbi et Orbi" back in St Peter's Square, just half an hour before he greeted participants in the New Year's Day marathon in Rome, starting from St Peter's.
Yesterday, the Pope rounded off a busy three days when addressing a crowd of more than 50,000 gathered for the first appointment of the Holy Year, namely the Children's Jubilee. Pope John Paul might have had a busy schedule but he, at least, was able to get around. Which is more than could be said for the estimated 1 1/2 million who chose to ring in the New Year in Rome, attracted no doubt as much by the charisma of the Eternal City and its most famous inhabitant as by the three rock mega-concerts (in St Peter's Square, Piazza del Popolo and outside the President's Palace).
With public transport either much reduced or non-existent, central Rome became gridlocked into a non-stop street party in which frustrated motorists simply abandoned the idea of going any further and stopped where they were to pop open a bottle of spumante as bells rang out at midnight. At one point, the combination of rock music and hundreds of thousands of dancing feet was so fiercesome that worried citizens jammed police phone lines to enquire if Rome was suffering an earthquake.
The dancing feet, however, damaged at least three of Rome's ancient artefacts (two statutes and a fountain in Piazza del Popolo) while hundreds of cars close to the rock concert in the same piazza were badly damaged as frustrated fans used them as impromptu grandstands. Even more frustrated, perhaps, were the estimated 10,000 travellers who slept out the early hours of the New Year morning in Rome's Termini Station, creating a human log-jam that eased up only by midday.
In Rome's celebrated Piazza Spagna, one young man embarked on a striptease notwithstanding the zero temperatures only to find that he had been upstaged by four respectable ladies on another balcony, four ladies in whose ranks were a writer, an art historian, a businesswoman and a photographer and who bared their breasts in response to incitement from the midnight crowd.
For those who wished to contact loved ones by phone in or around midnight on New Year's Eve, things did not exactly go smoothly either, with both fixed phone and cell phone lines going on an 1 1/2-hour long blink as they were swamped by nearly four million calls in an hour. For Romans, the New Year began on a familiar note of chaos, but at least on this occasion at least it was mostly good-natured and festive chaos.
