Pope, Italy’s Chief Mourn Bomb Victims : Violence: Five dead, 40 hurt in blasts in Rome and Milan. Police seek clues in series of explosions.

Viewing the damage wrought by two of three bombs that ripped through Italy’s main cities the night before, Pope John Paul II and Italian President Oscar Luigi Scalfaro mourned together here Wednesday.

Three explosions had echoed through Rome and Milan around midnight Tuesday, leaving five dead and about 40 wounded. Police are searching for clues to the identity of the authors of these and other tragic explosions that have struck Italian cities in the last three months.

The Pope and the president picked their way through the rubble and broken glass inside the Vatican-owned palace adjacent to St. John Lateran Basilica, the Pope’s formal seat as bishop of Rome, while police and firefighters sifted through shards and pieces of car metal strewn around the cobblestoned piazza.

“I woke up suddenly at 1 a.m. this morning,” said the Pope as he commiserated with workers among the debris. “Now I know why.”

The front part of the car that carried the bomb had been blown onto the roof of the neighboring loggia. The sturdy palace was intact, but its massive windows had no glass left in them, and frescoed walls on the upper level were blown off.

Earlier Wednesday, during his weekly public audience in the Vatican, the pontiff expressed his prayerful solidarity with “the innocent victims of this vile attack that struck last night, at Milan and at the heart of Christian Rome.”

A second explosion in Rome destroyed the medieval portico of an early Christian church, San Giorgio in Velabro, in the core of ancient Rome near the Forum. The church, a favorite wedding site for Roman couples today, is also close to the Campidoglio, the traditional seat of Roman government in imperial and modern times.

As police sought to explain the bombings, Interior Minister Nicola Mancino announced the resignation of Angelo Finocchiaro, who headed the civilian branch of the intelligence service. Finocchiaro’s jurisdiction has seen a series of unsolved terrorist-style bombings, and he had been implicated in an investigation of corruption in the service.

Mancino also reported to Parliament on similarities between this week’s violence and car-bomb explosions earlier this year. One damaged the famous Uffizi Gallery in Florence and killed five people, and another struck an elegant residential area of Rome. Last year, an explosion in a street in Palermo, Sicily, killed anti-Mafia judge Paolo Borsellino and his four bodyguards.

In Milan on Wednesday, a stream of sympathizers visited the scene of the bombing that left a large crater in the road outside the city’s modern art museum, housed in an 18th-Century neoclassical villa. Explosives on the back seat of a Fiat blew up, killing three firefighters who had been summoned to douse the flames of a burning car. The blast also killed a policeman who was trying to reroute passing cars. Another victim was a Moroccan immigrant asleep on a nearby park bench.

By Wednesday evening, Milan police forces had put together a composite image of a young blond woman who had been seen at the scene of the explosion shortly before it occurred.

Also in Milan, thousands joined a protest march at the central Piazza Fontana, scene of a 1969 terror bombing that is still unsolved. In December of that year, a bomb killed 17 people. Milan’s chief prosecutor, Saverio Borrelli, termed Tuesday’s explosions in both cities “symbolic attacks” meant to further destabilize Italy’s already shaky political and economic climate.

The country is in the throes of a political revolution as Parliament debates radical reforms of the electoral system. And more than 3,000 business and political leaders have been arrested or implicated as judges unravel a longstanding system of political payoffs by business and industrial leaders.