Interior Minister Roberto Maroni on Thursday said the government will resolve the issue of unauthorised gypsy camps in Italy ''by the end of the year''.
Speaking a week after the government promised new legislation that would allow police to ''clear'' unauthorised camps, Maroni said city prefects will be given special powers to deal with the issue at local level when the cabinet meets on Friday.
The prefects of Rome, Milan and Naples will receive the powers, which Maroni described as ''going beyond laws currently in force''.
''In these settlements there are good people who live in miserable conditions and a lot of minors,'' he said at the International Security Forum in Jerusalem.
''Naturally we are not going to go in with bulldozers and flatten them, but we need to find a solution. The law must be respected''.
Maroni said the first step in the government plan will be to carry out a census of the people living in gypsy (or Roma) camps, and particularly those that are unauthorised.
''In Rome there are around 90 illegal camps of small dimensions, in Naples eight or nine large ones. For that reason every city needs to adopt a made-to-measure plan,'' he explained.
''I have extended the survey to all the prefects of Italy because I want to know how many camps there are in each province and who lives in them''.
Gypsy camps sparked a public order debate earlier this month when Naples residents torched a number of settlements on the outskirts of the city after a 16-year-old Roma woman tried to kidnap a baby, forcing the Roma to flee.
Maroni claims the government crackdown on unauthorised camps - part of a wider security package - will ''prevent rage prevailing over civilised co-existence'' amid fears that such episodes may recur.
According to the UN Refugee Agency, there are an estimated 170,000 gypsies living in Italy, of whom 136,000 are originally from Romania and 34,000 from the Balkans.
Earlier this month Romanian Prime Minister Calin Popeascu Tariceanu said Italy had been ''too soft'' in allowing the spread of gypsy camps, which he said served ''as a base to carry out crime''.
Tariceanu also noted that France and Germany did not have problems with Roma crime because these countries did not allow the nomads to set up camp.
Italy's new security package also includes measures to make illicit immigration a jailable offence and to expel foreigners who receive jail sentences of two years or more.
The package has been criticised both at home and abroad, with both the Council of Europe (which upholds human rights standards on the continent) and the European Parliament expressing concern.
The Council of Europe's Human Rights Commissioner Thomas Hammarberg sent a letter to Italy earlier this month requesting clarification and urging politicians to do everything possible to avoid ''feeding xenophobia''.
