Under fire for alleged inaction on the Naples trash emergency, the government vowed on Monday to be ready with a ''radical'' solution within 24 hours.
As Premier Romano Prodi met President Giorgio Napolitano to fill him in on the latest developments, government spokesman Silvio Sircana dismissed a fresh scolding from the mayor of Naples, theoretically a Prodi ally.
''This is not the time for polemics. We're working on a radical solution to the trash emergency. Within 24 hours we'll be ready,'' he said.
Prodi, who met Interior Minister Giuliano Amato and Environment Minister Alfonso Pecoraro Scanio during the day, would hold an inter-ministerial meeting on the crisis on Tuesday morning, Sircana said.
Political tensions provoked by the trash emergency intensified on Monday, as Naples Mayor Rosa Russo Iervolino - once Prodi's interior minister - openly accused him of inaction.
''The premier was told about the possibility of arriving at a situation like this at a meeting on January 11 last year,'' she said. ''Strangely, nothing happened after that meeting''.
The Naples trash emergency erupted again Monday morning as scores of protesters clashed with police trying to clear a way to a dump at the centre of the crisis.
Locals threw rocks and metal bolts as police escorted a bulldozer to try to remove an improvised rampart erected overnight at the entrance to the dump.
Police responded with their batons. At least three people were hurt and taken to hospital.
In the early evening, after spending the day caught in a tense stand-off with about 200 protestors, police vehicles were pulled out to shouts of ''victory!'' from demonstrators.
Meanwhile, the army was sent in to clear rubbish-strewn streets in other parts of the Campania region.
Schools which had been closed because of health risks reopened at the order of Premier Romano Prodi but only a handful of students left their homes.
The Naples archbishop, Cardinal Crescenzio Sepe, told a newspaper that ''the Church is in mourning because it sees the city devastated and humiliated, and people's dignity trampled''.
A former interior minister, Beppe Pisanu of ex-premier Silvio Berlusconi's Forza Italia Party, said on Italian radio that the recurrent trash emergencies of the last decade had been stoked by the local Mafia, the Camorra, which makes a lucrative business out of waste recycling.
Other members of the opposition criticised Pecoraro Scanio's Green Party for allegedly impeding the opening of incinerators to cope with the recurrent emergencies.
There were fresh calls for the resignation of Antonio Bassolino, the regional governor who for years was emergency waste commissioner.
