The Local

Lazio had hoped to be left flying the flag as Italy's only survivors in Europe on Thursday after winning the first leg of their last 16 Europa League tie in Prague 1-0.
   
But three first-half goals put Zdenek Scasny's visitors firmly in the driving seat to the frustration of Lazio's fans.
   
Konate was eventually substituted on the hour but not before he was targeted with sporadic monkey chants - an incident that could see Lazio sanctioned by UEFA disciplinary bosses next week when they meet in Nyon, Switzerland.
   
Lazio captain Lucas Biglia said after the game: "It's shameful."
   
Having finished last season with a flurry to beat Napoli to the last Champions League qualifying place, only to fail to reach the competition, Stefano Pioli's Lazio side has been remarkably inconsistent this season.
   
Squad harmony is reported to be at an all-time low as they chase an unlikely place in Europe next season amid rapidly dwindling attendances and dissatisfaction with club president Claudio Lotito.
   
Bosnia defender Senad Lulic said the disunity of Lazio could be seen after the final whistle on Thursday.
   
Speaking to Gazzetta dello Sport, he said: "It's not normal there were only four of us (players) left on the pitch to be whistled at, while all the others scarpered.
   
"It shows you how much of a team we have."
   
Rome-based newspaper Il Tempo gave short shrift to Lazio's performance with the headline 'RidicoLazio', suggesting in an editorial that Lotito and Pioli's stay at the club would be further contested.
   
It is the first time since the 2000-2001 season there is no Italian club at the quarter-finals stage in Europe.
   
Napoli and Fiorentina's Europa League campaigns were ended by Villarreal and Tottenham respectively at the last 32 stage a fortnight ago.
   
Roma and Juventus, Italy's representatives in the Champions League, exited to Real Madrid and Baye Munich respectively at the last 16 stage.

Subtitled "The Art of the Guggenheim Collections", the exhibition, which will run in the Tuscan city's Palazzo Strozzi until July 24th, explores how bohemian socialite Peggy, her uncle Solomon and the celebrated New York museum he established influenced European and American art from the 1920s to the 1960s.

Curated by Luca Massimo Barbero, it features paintings, sculptures, photographs and engravings borrowed from the Guggenheim museums in New York and Venice and a small number of other museums and private collections.

"Peggy Guggenheim (1898-1979) did not just buy works, she bet on young artists and supported them thanks to an incredible artistic instinct and curiosity," Barbero said. "She was so sure of her own taste, she never compromised."

The fruit of those instincts was the acquisition of works by an extraordinary list of artists: Wassily Kandinsky, Marcel Duchamp, Max Est (to whom Peggy was married from 1941-46), Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock and Alexander Calder, to name just a selection.

As a result, the Florence exhibition is able to offer a rare opportunity to view some seminal works of pre-WWII mode art, including pieces by Max Est, Man Ray and Pablo Picasso, alongside illustrations of the divergent post-war trends on either side of the Atlantic.

It also tells the story of Peggy Guggenheim's arrival in Europe in 1921, her retu to the United States during World War II and her decision to finally base herself and her collection in Venice from 1949.

"Peggy wanted to understand the artistic effervescence of Europe at the time so she simply moved here," Berbero said.

In the Paris of the roaring 20s she mixed with poets, writers, painters and sculptors, serving both as patron and as muse.

A Bacon in her bedroom

Important purchases during the inter-war period included Italian sculptor Giacometti's "Woman Walking" and Picasso's "The Dream and Lie of Franco."

With the outbreak of war in 1939, Guggenheim was transformed from socialite collector to a mother figure desperately trying to protect her artists in the face of the Nazi threat.

She was forced to flee Europe herself in 1941 and Pollock, who has 18 works in the exhibition, was one of the major beneficiaries of the time she spent back in the United States.

In 1943 she gave him a contract that enabled him to give up his work as a maintenance man and devote himself full-time to his art.

The exhibition opens with works by Kandinsky, Duchamp and Est and then goes on to explore postwar developments on both sides of the Atlantic, contrasting the work of Europe's Informalist school including Alberto Burri and Lucio Fontana with the abstract expressionism of Pollock and Rothko and the later development of Pop Art led by Roy Lichtenstein.

Palazzo Strozzi has been chosen as the venue because it was here that Peggy first showed the collection that was later to find a permanent home in Venice, shortly after her retu to Europe.

Twenty-five works from that original exhibition are back in Florence for this one.

Highlights include Kandinsky's "Dominant Curve" (1936), which Peggy owned but sold in what she later counted as one of the "seven tragedies in her life as a collector", and Francis Bacon's "Study for Chimpanzee" (1957).

Rarely shown outside Venice, the collector was so fond of Bacon's work she generally had it hanging in her bedroom.

The incident happened on Thursday afteoon, on the bridge in front of Castel Sant'Angelo -  a popular tourist spot in the city centre, Corriere Della Sera reported.

Two fans were filmed approaching a female beggar, who was dressed in rags and hunched on the ground with her head bowed. The men then began to urinate on her, as scores of tourists looked on indifferently.

The woman quickly got up and moved out of the way before she was given some change by a sympathetic stranger.

 A video of the incident can be seen below.

“I didn't see the urination but I saw some of the fans at lunchtime near the Trevi fountain,” a local resident told The Local. “They were already drunk and were shouting in a very threatening way.”

The Prague fans were in town ahead of a clash with Lazio in the last 16 of the Europa League competition, a match which saw Lazio crash out of the competition following a 3-0 defeat.

This is not the first time hooligans have run amok ahead of a European fixture in Rome.

Last year, rampant PSV Eindhoven fans trashed the recently restored Barcaccia fountain near the Spanish Steps, designed by Italian artists Pietro and Gian Lorenzo Beini in 1927.

Thursday's incident follows similar scenes involving PSV fans in Madrid who were filmed humiliating beggars in the Spanish capital.
 

The 59-year-old Islamist still risks extradition to Italy, however, where a terror charge awaits him. Krekar is listed as a terrorist by the United States and United Nations.

In November, Italian police swooped on a European jihadist network that was allegedly planning to try and spring Faraj out of detention. Seventeen people were targeted in the raids across Europe - 16 Kurds and a Kosovan. Six of them were arrested in Italy, four in Britain and three in Norway.

Krekar faces charges in Italy for terrorist plots and is suspected of leading the organization Rawti Shax, an offshoot of the jihadist group Ansar al-Islam.

Italy has filed an extradition request for Krekar and two others, but the Islamist’s lawyer found to blocked it.

“I have said that he is not going to be extradited to Italy and I’m going to work on that,” Brynjar Meling told the Norwegian news agency NTB.

Krekar was sentenced by the Oslo District Court in October to one-and-a-half years in prison for threatening the life of Halmat Goran, a Kurd who had bued a copy of the Koran. On Thursday, jurors at the Court of Appeal disagreed that Krekar had threatened the man.

Krekar’s Idea on national broadcaster NRK came in the same interview in which he praised the Charlie Hebdo terror attacks in Paris.

“The cartoonist has become an infidel at war, and therefore it is permissible to kill him,” Krekar told the interviewer, arguing the attacks were justified under Islamic law.

“As he has trampled on our dignity, our principles and beliefs, so he must die. Anyone who does not respect 30 percent of the world's population has no right to live.”

Krekar had issued a death sentence, a fatwa, on Goran and said that anyone aware of the sentence “may kill him”. The Islamist also offered to send a “gift” to whoever did the deed.

His Idea came just one month after he finished a two year and ten month prison sentence for his 2012 conviction on charges that he threatened Prime Minister Ea Solberg.

Solberg was the minister of local govement at the time and had signed his expulsion order in 2003 because he was considered a threat to national security.

"Norway will pay a heavy price for my death," he said during a meeting with inteational media in June 2010.

"If for example Ea Solberg deports me and I die as a result, she will suffer the same fate," he said in Arabic.

"I don't know who will kill her: Al-Qaeda, Ansar al-Islam, my family, my children. I don't know... But she will pay the price."

Although Norway’s authorities wanted to expel him from the country on national security grounds as long ago as 2003, they are prevented from doing so but because he faces the death penalty if he is retued to Iraq.

The founder of the Ansar al-Islam group, Krekar has lived in Norway since 1991. Last year, authorities banished him to a a refugee centre in Kyrksæterøra, a village of 2,500 people situated 500 kilometres (300 miles) from the capital.

The gang of four Greek nationals and two Iraqis were arrested in Messolonghi, weste Greece, on Wednesday as a small Piper plane carrying the migrants, including four children, was about to take off.

The migrants had been driven from Athens by the two Iraqi smugglers.

"A criminal network was dismantled for illegally transferring the migrants from Greece to countries in weste Europe on small aircraft," the police said in a statement.

The network had successfully sent 12 groups of migrants to Italy, the police said, adding that each passenger paid the smugglers between €4,500 to €7,500.

The migrant children were sent to a juvenile welfare centre, police said. It was not clear what happened to the adults.

Police also seized the Piper aircraft, €34,430 in cash, two cars, 700 grams of cannabis and shotgun cartridges during the raid.

The police identified the leader of the gang as one of the arrested Iraqis, and said they were continuing their investigation to find other accomplices.

The non-binding deal with Beijing Automotive and Biac Etealand Property will, if implemented, see the two Chinese companies licensed to establish the park in a still-to-be-decided Chinese city.

The luxury sportscar maker and Formula One powerhouse already has a theme park on an island near Abu Dhabi and is in the process of constructing another one in Spain.

The parks are one of the ways in which the company is hoping to leverage its luxury brand to generate additional revenues.

The company's sales in China, which represent about five percent of its total worldwide, fell 22 percent in 2015.

The decision was made after residents in the Ligurian coastal town of Bordighera, close to the French border, complained that they were being bothered by panhandlers.

Mayor Giacomo Pallanca said it was "pointless" to punish the beggars "who can't or will never be able to pay" fines, and so the onus will now be on people to stop giving them money.

The mayor ushered the rule in ahead of the tourism season, which usually gets underway over the Easter weekend.

"Since real organizations are often behind this phenomenon, we must eradicate it by discouraging those who offer money," he told Il Secolo XIX.

“For anyone who is really in a state of destitution, there are social services available.”

Pallanca was unavailable for comment when contacted by The Local.

Similar initiatives have divided debate, but Steve Baes, the co-founder of Project Rome, which supports hundreds of homeless people in the Italian capital, said the move by Bordighera is “very positive”.

“Not only is it humiliating to throw a few small coins at a person on the street, but it is far better to show them genuine compassion and kindness,” Baes, who himself has been homeless, told The Local.

“A move like this also eliminates the risk of supporting organized street crime or fuelling an alcohol or drug habit, which could better be supported by the appropriate authorities.”

Project Rome also urges people to stop giving money, and instead start acting with genuine warmth.

“They need to be treated as fellow humans and not invisible, or someone to rain small change down on.”

At a national level, begging is legal in Italy. And even though it is forbidden to beg with children or animals, enforcement of the law is lax.

But other Italian cities have also adopted their own rules. In 2008, Venice became the first city to take a hardline approach by banning beggars.  Fines of between €25 and €50 were introduced for those caught begging, while police can also confiscate their takings.The move was mostly aimed at preventing children from being exploited by criminal groups.

Meanwhile, penalizing begging has aroused fierce debate in other countries. Last year, Norway was forced to scrap a proposal that would have slapped fines and jail terms on beggars and those who help them amid global outrage.

Begging is illegal in Denmark and the UK, where prosecutions surged 70 percent in 2014.

The draft legislation, which is expected to be definitively approved soon after examination by the Senate, reforms complicated tax rules which previously acted as a barrier to food donations to groups working with the needy.

It also relaxes some food safety regulations to enable distribution of products in the window between their "sell by" and "use by" deadlines.

The move follows the adoption of similar measures in France in February. Italy throws away food worth an estimated €12 billion every year with just over half that total accounted for by private households.

Restaurants account for 21 percent, shops 15 percent and agriculture around eight percent, according to food producers' organisation Coldiretti.

"The situation remains serious: each Italian throws away around 76 kilogrammes of food every year," the organisation said in a statement.

Some six million Italians currently depend on supplies from charities who distribute some 550,000 tonnes of food aid every year. The new law aims to double the amount handed out.

The duo, suspected of being members of a Swiss-based cell of the powerful Italian crime organization ‘Ndrangheta, have refused to be extradited.

Since they are naturalized Swiss, they cannot be extradited against their will, the Swiss federal justice office said in a statement on Thursday.

According to the ministry, the additional 15 alleged ‘Ndrangheta members arrested in Switzerland on March 8th – who are all Italian – are also refusing to be extradited to Italy, as requested by Rome.

Twelve of them were detained in the northe canton of Thurgau, one in the neighbouring canton of Zurich and two in the Valais.

Italian police believe the ‘Ndrangheta group – which they describe as the most active, richest and most powerful crime syndicate in Europe – uses legitimate activities in northe Italy to recycle the huge amounts of cash generated by their drugs business.

In the statement, the Swiss said they must now examine if Italy’s request meets the conditions demanded by the European convention on extradition.

Switzerland is obliged to extradite the two suspects arrested in the canton of Valais since they were already sentenced to nine and six years jail respectively by a court in Reggio Calabria, Southe Italy, in 2014 for offences committed in Italy.

Twelve of the group have been released on bail, since the justice ministry “judges that the flight risk is slim”.

In their case, there is no obligation for the Swiss to comply with Italy’s extradition request since their alleged offences were committed in Switzerland.

The announcement came as the company, which last month agreed to sell its rail and traffic signal businesses to Japan's Hitachi in a $2.0 billion deal,  announced better-than-expected results for 2015.

Finmeccanica said the Hitachi deal would allow it to focus on the core aerospace, defence and security businesses, in line with massive restructuring efforts under a so-called "one company" plan.

"With the execution of the new organisational and operating model as 'One Company'... Finmeccanica has not only redefined its own structure to make it more consistent with customers and markets requirements... but it also aimed to redefine its identity," the group said in a statement, explaining the need for a new name.

Shareholders will be asked to approve the change at a meeting in April.

In the same statement, Finmeccanica said net profits rose to €527 million ($591 million) last year, up from €20 million the year before.

Eaings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation (Ebita) - a key raw measure of financial performance - came to €1.2 billion, up 23 percent on the previous year.

The group also lowered its net debt by €684 million to €3.278 billion, in part thanks to the sale to Hitachi, it added.

Describing 2015 as "a tuing point for Finmeccanica", the group said it had achieved results "which were higher than expectations".

Best known for painting the Mona Lisa, Tuscan-bo Leonardo (1452-1519) was also a genius inventor and is credited with having first thought of a vertical-flight machine.

Now a selection of the priceless works held by the Torlonia family, one of Rome's oldest dynasties, is finally to go on public view following an agreement this week between the Italian ministry of culture and the family foundation.

Under the deal, between 60 and 90 of the works in a collection which counts 620 pieces will be displayed in Rome in the second half of 2017.

An overseas tour is to follow before they are finally housed in a permanent centre in Rome.

Having amassed a fortune from banking in the 18th Century, the Torlonia family went on to become important collectors of antiquities and objects d'art, often accepting individual pieces as security against loans.

The bulk of the collection has spent decades in the basement of a family palace in the Trastevere neighbourhood of central Rome after Prince Alessandro Torlonia decided to convert the building into a 90-flat condominium.

Legend has it that curiosity over the treasures that lay below the block promoted renowned archaeologist Rannuccio Bianchi Bandinelli to disguise himself as a refuse collector in order to get in and check them out.

The Italian state has made repeated requests for the marble works to be handed over to public ownership, so far in vain.

"Deal done. After 45 years David Gilmour is retuing to play Pompeii on July 7th and 8th, #PinkFloyd #LiveatPompei", Dario Franceschini tweeted.

Adrian Maben directed 1972 'rockumentary' release "Pink Floyd, live at Pompeii" at the venue.

Filmed in October 1971, the work was notable for having no audience at a venue which can hold several thousand.

The film was mixed with extra footage filmed in Paris before a 1974 re-release and a 2003 'director's cut' on DVD.

The concert will be filmed in high definition and shown in cinemas for three days to generate extra revenue with concert ticket sales insufficient to cover all the costs of staging the event, Panorama weekly magazine reported.

Following Gilmour, 70, who recently released a successful solo album "Rattle that Lock," will be Elton John, who will play Pompeii on July 12th.

Gilmour will launch a summer tour in Poland on June 25th.

Pompeii, buried in volcanic ash after the AD 79 eruption of Vesuvius, is Italy's second most visited tourist site after the Rome Colosseum, welcoming 2.7 million visitors in 2014.

Further rescue operations were ongoing, a spokesman told AFP.

The figures represent a pick-up in the flow of migrants attempting to reach Italy via Libya, a route through which around 330,000 people have made it to Europe since the start of 2014.

Prior to the latest rescues, the UN refugee agency (UNHCR) had reported 9,500 landing at Italian ports since the start of the year.

This compares with more than 143,000 who have reached Greek islands by crossing the Aegean Sea since January 1st.

With efforts underway to close the entry route through Greece, Italian authorities are wary of a surge in the number of migrants attempting to come through Libya.

So far there has been no indication of that happening. Numbers arriving from Libya have always fluctuated in line with weather conditions in the Mediterranean and other factors.

Arrivals were slightly down in 2015 compared with 2014 - a trend that may be related to the political chaos in Libya which might have deterred some migrants and has also made it harder for those that do make the jouey to find work there while awaiting boats to Italy.

But despite ordering 12 arrests in Moldova and Italy they have yet to recover any of the 17 artworks that disappeared in November from the northe city's Castelvecchio museum, which values the missing canvases at €15 million ($16 million).

"We are on the right track but we have not yet been able to put our hands on the missing paintings," Verona prosecutor Mario Giulio Schinaia was quoted as saying by local media.

At the time of the robbery, police said it appeared the works had been stolen 'to order' for a private collector, given the difficulty anyone would have in selling on works by such well-known artists.

Three masked men entered the 14th century building at the evening change of guard, slipping in after the museum had been emptied but before its state-of-the-art security system had been put into oveight mode.

A security guard and another member of staff were tied up before the pictures were taken.

The guard is one of the suspects arrested, along with his brother and the brother's Moldovan girlfriend, who is suspected of having alerted the robbers to the potential to pull off the audacious heist.

The thieves' haul included "Portrait of a Lady" by Flemish Baroque painter Peter Paul Rubens and "Male Portrait" by Venetian artist Tintoretto, as well as works by Pisanello, Jacopo Bellini, Giovanni Francesco Caroto and Hans de Jode.

Another acclaimed work, "The Conversion of Saul", by Italian Renaissance painter Giulio Licinio, was damaged during the robbery but has since been successfully restored.

Currently, expats who have not been resident in the UK for over 15 years are ineligible to vote in general elections. Despite hope that the restriction would before the referendum, it remains in place, much to the anger of long-term expats.

This group is estimated to number 2.2 million - almost half of the five million Britons currently living abroad.

Lawyers will lodge the claim at Britain's High Court on Wednesday, acting on behalf of a group of expats, which includes pensioners’ rights campaigner 94-year-old war veteran Harry Shindler, who lives in Italy and has previously petitioned the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) about the law, and Brian Cave, who lives in France.

Shindler, who lives in the Marche hamlet of Porto d'Ascoli, has for more than twelve years fought to reclaim his right to vote. 

“This really is the last gasp, there will be nowhere to go after this,” he told The Local.

“It’s very important. To say we can’t vote on an issue that conces us is wrong.”

Still, Shindler said he was "very confident" about the outcome of the challenge.

One of the reasons being is the fact that members appointed to the House of Lords, the upper house of the UK parliament, who alongside British people overseas for more than 15 years are not allowed to vote in a general election, will be able to cast their vote in the upcoming referendum.

“The British govement is telling us they’re applying the same rule used in the general elections – but this is not correct. The rules are being bent for members of the House of Lords.”

Giving long-term expats the right to vote is also “common sense”, he added.

“These are the people who are more conceed with the outcome on the referendum than anyone else."

Lawyer Richard Stein from Leigh day said the firm's clients "are being penalized for exercising their EU free movement rights".

"The people it arbitrarily excludes are those UK citizens who are among those most likely to be affected by the decision taken by voters in this referendum," he added in a statement.

“Not to allow them to vote on the decision whether the UK remains part of the EU is unlawful and we have asked the court to deal with the issues urgently so that the act can be amended before the June date, to include all UK citizens residing in the EU for however long.”

Charlotte Oliver, an English lawyer based in Rome who runs her own practice in the Italian capital and supports the legal action being taken, said:

"I am one of millions of people who make up the ever-increasing inteational British community, having lived in Italy since 2001 for family reasons. However, I still consider the UK my home, and the place where I will retire one day.

"As the Conservative Party made clear in their manifesto, there should be a vote for life for British citizens. The cut off point of 15 years is arbitrary and arcane given travel and communications have improved so much since it was imposed in 1982.

"It does not prove that a person has severed all ties with their country of origin. I cannot vote in Italian elections either as I am not an Italian national, so I am disenfranchised.”
The case, if successful, could have a huge impact on preparations for Britain’s EU referendum on June 23rd.

At the last UK general election in 2015, 106,000 Brits who had been resident abroad for less than 15 years registered to vote.

While expatriates who have lived abroad long-term may not be significantly affected by the results of general or local UK elections, the Brexit referendum would have a huge impact on their lives.

David Cameron’s Conservative Party also pledged to "introduce votes for life, scrapping the rule that bars British citizens who have lived abroad for more than 15 years from voting". However, this change will not come into force before the referendum.

If successful, the referendum scheduled for late June may have to be delayed while the extra names are added to the electoral register.

If you are a British expat and have been living in Italy for less than 15 years, you can vote in the EU referendum on June 23rd. To register CLICK HERE. 

The man, from Settimo Torinese, a small town outside the northe Italian city of Turin, left several Idea on the social media site on a story about the death of a 17-year-old student from Siracusa in Sicily, La Stampa reported.

The student was killed in a road accident while driving his scooter in October.

The man's posts made liberal use used the word terrone, a highly offensive word used to describe people from south or central Italy.

The word comes from the root terra, meaning land, and is used to deride people living south of Bologna.

The word implies that southeers are lazy, ignorant peasants and is testament to the strong cultural and economic divide that exists between north and south Italy.

“That's one terrone less for us [northe Italians] to support,” he wrote. “I know that in the coffin there is an ignorant southeer and I enjoy it.”

Another post read “Good evening sh***y terroni, will any more of you die today?”

His shocking Idea were widely shared by incredulous people on social media and were eventually reported to police in Siracusa.

Prosecutors used a specialist telecommunications investigation unit to track down the man, who had used a fake profile to make the offensive remarks. 

“Among all forms of poverty, moral poverty poses the greatest risk to humanity,” the public prosecutor, Francesco Paolo Giordano, was quoted as saying by La Stampa.  

Cambridge University PhD student Giulio Regeni, 28, was found dumped in a ditch on the outskirts of Cairo in February, in a case that has strained ties between Italy and Egypt.
   
Egyptian authorities are working "day and night" to solve the crime, President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi said in an interview with Italy's La Repubblica newspaper.
   
"I promise you that we will do everything to shed light (on the case) and we will get to the truth," he said.
   
Addressing Regeni's family, he added: "We will work with the Italian authorities to bring to justice and punish the criminals that killed your son."
   
Sisi said that as a "father first and foremost", he understood the "pain and suffering that you feel at the loss of your son."
   
"I feel the shock and bitteess that has broken your heart," he said.
 
Regeni disappeared on January 25. Many Italians believe he was abducted and killed by elements of the Egyptian security services, an allegation the authorities in Cairo have rejected as baseless.
   
His slaying while he was in Cairo doing research for his doctoral thesis has become a cause celebre amongst academics around the world and has tued the spotlight on what rights and opposition groups say are increasing abuses by security services under the military-backed govement in Cairo.

"Albania has sought Italy's help to strengthen its border controls and cope with the various security problems should there be a flow of migrants heading towards the Albanian frontier," Tahiri told a press conference.

"Albania cannot cope with a wave of migrants by itself," he said.

Albania has had relatively few migrants crossing its borders on the route which stretches from Greece to Germany and Sweden.

But it fears an influx after Macedonia closed off its border to migrants coming from Greece, the starting point on the Balkans section of the trail.

Fears of an 'Adriatic route' opening up from Albania to Italy's southe Puglia region have also been stoked, especially among tour operators, who worry that the potential influx could damage the region's vital tourism sector.

Read more: Puglia fears potential refugee influx will deter tourists

Tahiri said Italian Interior Minister Angelino Alfano would visit Tirana, the Albanian capital, next week to discuss a joint response in the event of a massive influx of migrants.

Albania is hoping for technical support and personnel to help its police check and record migrant entries and to verify documents.

European Migration Commissioner Dimitris Avramopoulos is expected for talks in Tirana on Friday.

Albania is awaiting "an overall decision" at European level for coping with the crisis but "in any case does not intend to open its borders to migrants," Tahiri said.

He added that that "for now," the situation was "calm."

"The police have stepped up controls and for the moment there haven't been any attempts by migrants to cross the Albanian border," the minister said.

More than a million migrants and refugees have arrived in Europe since last year, plunging the continent into its worst migration crisis since the Second World War.

Conces mounted after Puglia’s regional president, Michele Emiliano, said last week that as many as 150,000 refugees could arrive this year now that the route between Greece and northe Europe has been blocked.

The route closure could see refugees instead crossing to Puglia over the Strait of Otranto from Albania, which borders Greece.

The region’s coastguard has been on high alert since Serbia and Macedonia shut off their borders last week.

Meanwhile, Italian authorities, worried about a repeat of 1991, when thousands of Albanian refugees made the same jouey following the collapse of communism, have also despatched police officers to Albania to strengthen border controls.

“The situation is calm right now, but if it does reach significant proportions it will severely hurt tourism,” Francesco Caizzi, the president of Federalberghi, the Italian hotel association, for Bari province, told The Local, adding that hotel owners had voiced their conces during a recent meeting.

Although hoteliers have not reported an impact on bookings so far, he waed that the region “needs to be prepared”.

“The tourism sector is strongly affected by certain influences – just look at what happened in Lampedusa, where tourism has been hurt since the island became a place for thousands of migrants.”

Interior Minister Angelino Alfano has moved to calm the fears, saying last week that there was no evidence, at least not as yet, of the number of refugee arrivals in Puglia intensifying.

Others in the region have also played down conces, saying that Puglia, with its coastline stretching over more than 800km, is more than equipped to deal with large numbers of refugees.

“I’ve said this several times before – this refugee 'upheaval' has not happened yet,” Mauro Della Valle, the Salento president for Federbalneari, an association for beach-side resorts, told The Local.

“Besides, the refugee phenomenon in Puglia is not new – it’s been happening for years. We also can’t compare it to Lampedusa, which is small. Puglia has stretches of coastline.”

Della Valle added that town and city mayors are prepared for any arrivals, with shelters being set up across the region.

A so-called 'hotspot' has also been established in the port of Taranto to help facilitate the speedy processing of refugee arrivals.

“This is a humanitarian emergency, and we will react how we’ve always done – by being welcoming. Besides, refugees don't want to stay here, they want to move on to northe Europe."

But the route towards the likes of Germany from Italy is also looking increasingly precarious after Austria’s Foreign Minister Sebastian Kurz called for further border controls on Sunday, saying that he wants to shut off the Italian Mediterranean route into Austria.

To date, the main route into Italy for refugees has been through Sicily. Eighty percent of the 153,000 who arrived in Italy in 2015 landed in Sicily from Libya and Egypt, according to figures from the Inteational Organization for Migration (IOM).

The gigantic growth was extracted during a three-hour operation late last week by the team led by Professor Riccardo Masetti at the Policlinico Agostini Gemelli hospital.

A histological exam is being carried out to understand more about the growth.

“It's an almost unique case due to the its huge dimensions," Masetti told Andkronos.

"In 35 years I've never seen a tumour like it."

Though the lump was massive by normal standards, it still falls some way short of the world record.

According to Guinness World Records, the record stands at a whopping 137.6kg - removed from the ovary of a woman by surgeons at America's Stanford University in 1991.

“Unfortunately, situations like this occur because patients are paralyzed by fear when they discover a growth and it creates a vicious circle,” explained Masetti.

As the tumour grows, people also develop a sense of shame and worry that they will get into trouble for not having spoken up about the problem sooner, he added.

President of the Lazio region, Nicola Zingaretti, congratulated the surgical team in a message, saying their work represented “another battle won in the region's fight against tumours.”