More from from Rome and beyond

• EX-U.S. PRESIDENTS TO ATTEND FUNERAL  | 10:25 p.m. ET

Former Presidents Bush and Clinton will accompany President Bush to the funeral of Pope John Paul II, the White House says. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will also be part of the small official U.S. delegation, but former Presidents Carter and Ford will not.

The president and his wife, Laura, will lead the group representing the United States at the funeral on Friday, said White House press secretary Scott McClellan.

McClellan said the White House “reached out” to Carter, but he would not explain why Carter was not going along.

A spokesman at The Carter Center in Atlanta, Jon Moore, said Carter — relishing the memories of two visits as president with the pontiff — had told the White House he wanted to go to the funeral. Upon learning that the Vatican was limiting the U.S. delegation to five people and that “there were also others who were eager to attend,” Carter was “quite willing” to withdraw his request, Moore said.

“He and his wife Rosalynn are very pleased with the official delegation,” Moore said of Carter.

Former President Ford, who lives in California, is 91 and no longer travels extensively.

• PILGRIMS CONVERGE ON ROME | 7 p.m. ET

By the tens of thousands, Catholics from around the globe are streaming into Rome, fighting for taxis and squeezing into buses resembling rush-hour Tokyo subways.

A Polish college student hitchhiked for 54 hours, bouncing in the back of a lumber truck and a tractor-trailer rig hauling chocolates.

Her journey ended Tuesday at a makeshift tent city hastily erected on a wind-swept field on the outskirts of Rome. The ancient city has been coping with crowds for centuries, but now it’s bracing for an unprecedented crush of up to 4 million pilgrims determined to pay tearful tribute to Pope John Paul II.

“I wanted to do something, to give something back to this person who did so much for others,” Aleksandra Stominska, 20, who hitchhiked her way to Rome from Krakow, Poland, told The Associated Press.

Similar camps were being thrown up on a fairground, in an unused railway building and inside a concert hall, along with hundreds of portable toilets and medical tents to be manned round-the-clock starting Wednesday.

Mayor Walter Veltroni warned the city’s 3 million citizens that the run-up to Friday’s funeral could be unlike any influx they’ve ever seen, and it’s certainly shaping up that way. Poland’s Foreign Ministry said Tuesday that about 2 million Poles alone are expected to converge on Rome.

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