World News: Inferno in Italy as criminals set forests on fire

Feature:

Rome - Carlo Bono from Milan saw the sun "turn black". Mariella Valvo of Casale Monferrato, in northern Italy, compared it to "one of those American movies about Pompeii being destroyed by the lava of Mount Vesuvius".

Another spoke of women and children seeking refuge in the sea's shallow waters, "like Moses' exodus".

From Umbria to Sicily, half of Italy appears to be ablaze.

More than 300 forest and bush fires were reported on Tuesday alone, prompting more than 40,000 emergency calls to fire fighters in the space of just 24 hours.

Fires have destroyed thousands of hectares of countryside around the Amalfi coast, in Campania and near Castel Gandolfo, a town in the hills south of Rome which hosts the pope's summer residence and where Benedict XVI was due to arrive later this week.

Other badly affected areas include the island of Sardinia and the regions of Calabria and Marche.

Of the apocalyptic scenes described by witnesses in Wednesday's newspapers, by far the biggest drama took place in the southeastern seaside resort of Peschici, where fire and smoke killed two elderly siblings, poisoned 100 others and trapped thousands of tourists for hours on a nearby beach.

Fuelled by strong winds, flames as high as a three-storey building destroyed shrubs and forests around the area, prompting holidaymakers to abandon their camping sites and head towards the beach.

The flames spread rapidly and caused gas containers to explode. Rocco Fasanella and his sister Maria Carmela reportedly died while trying to escape.

In all, about 4,000 people were left homeless while thousands of tourists had to be evacuated by sea after spending hours under the sun on the Peschici beach.

"We felt like trapped mice," Giuseppe Festa told Corriere della Sera.

Wild fires such as the one around Peschici are an unfortunately common occurrence during Italy's hottest summers, when rain is scarce and temperatures can easily reach 40 degrees celsius.

But there's nothing natural about these annual disasters. Quite frequently, the fires are started by pyromaniacs, bored people - often pensioners - who have nothing better to do.

In other cases, they are sparked by money.

"Quite often they are started on commission by people who have some financial interest in seeing the land being burnt down," a policeman working for the Italian forestry corps told Corriere.

A farmer may want to set an area on fire to increase the amount of grazing land at his disposal, for instance; others may do so in order to build in a protected area - despite a seven-year-old law which prohibits anyone from building in a burnt-down area for at least 10 years.

Even more disconcertingly, of the nearly 100 people caught red- handed between 2000 and 2006, about 10 per cent of them were found to be forest wardens - the very people whose job it is to prevent wild fires from starting.

The logic here is that the more fires there are one year, the more forest wardens will be hired next year.

"You can't afford to be distracted when you have people starting fires according to very obvious criminal plans," complained Guido Bertolaso, the man in charge of handling such disasters as head of Italy's civil protection agency.