Tens of thousands of people filed into St Peter’s Basilica to pay final respects to Pope Francis on his last day of lying in state before his funeral.

The basilica was open for most of Thursday evening into Friday morning, shutting its doors for only three hours overnight.

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Long queues snaked around St Peter’s Square and the surrounding roads, before being funnelled through the heart of the basilica in a single column leading to the central altar, where Francis’s open coffin was displayed on a dais on Friday.

People were pressing forward slowly, some waiting hours, in order to have a few minutes inside to pay their respects to Francis.

The body of the 88-year-old pope, who died on Monday in his rooms at the Vatican’s Santa Marta guesthouse after suffering a stroke, was brought to St Peter’s in a solemn procession on Wednesday.

Since then, about 250,000 people from all over the world have bid farewell to the pontiff, the Vatican said.

“It’s a very strong feeling (to be here),” Patricio Castriota, a visitor who, like the pope, is from Argentina, told the Reuters news agency. “This farewell was very sad, but I thank God that I was able to see him.

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“He’s the only pope we’ve had who came from South America, a pope who had many good intentions for the Catholic Church,” said Castriota. “He cleaned up (a lot) of the bad, maybe not all of it, but he tried.”

Francis, who became pope in 2013, was the first pontiff from the Western Hemisphere and was known for a charming, and even humorous, demeanour.

His 12-year papacy was sometimes turbulent, with Francis seeking to overhaul a divided institution but battling with traditionalists who opposed his many changes.

“He humanised the church, without desacralising it,” said Cardinal Francois-Xavier Bustillo, who leads the Church on the French island of Corsica.

Hundreds of disappointed people were turned away when authorities closed St Peter’s Square hours before the viewing period ended. Public viewings ended at 7pm (17:00 GMT) on Friday, before a formal rite to seal the late pope’s coffin.

Reporting from the Vatican, Al Jazeera’s Hoda Abdel-Hamid said the cardinals were due to assist with the closure of the coffin in a private ceremony.

“Inside the coffin they will put twelve coins, each representing a year of Pope Francis’s papacy. There will also be a kind of metal tube with a paper inside, describing his papacy and legacy,” she said.

The Vatican said at least 130 foreign delegations had confirmed their attendance at Pope Francis’s funeral on Saturday, including about 50 heads of state and 10 reigning monarchs.

Among the foreign leaders, United States President Donald Trump is heading to Rome for the funeral, an unexpected first foreign trip of his second term in which he will face leaders including Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

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French President Emmanuel Macron, one leader who has managed to forge a bond with Trump, and outgoing German Chancellor Olaf Scholz will both be at the funeral, as will top European Union executives Ursula von der Leyen and Antonio Costa.

Also in attendance will be Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, a veteran leftist whose defeated rival Jair Bolsonaro was an ideological soulmate of Trump.