A campaign to introduce living wills in Italy gained fresh momentum on Tuesday following the death of a terminally ill man who went on a hunger strike to protest his right to die.
While stressing that she was against euthanasia, Health Minister Livia Turco said it was time Italy had a law "which allows sick people to express their will".
"A terminally ill patient must be guaranteed a dignified existence without being tortured by pain," she added.
Eight separate bills on the issue of living wills have been presented to parliament but all are currently stalled in the Senate.
Living wills are documents in which people stipulate what treatments they want if at some point in their lives they become unable to make a decision themselves.
Several parties in the centre-left governing coalition said getting a law approved was a priority after the death on Monday of Giovanni Nuvoli.
Nuvoli, a 53-year-old former referee who suffered from advanced muscular dystrophy, asked last April to be allowed to die without suffering.
His request unheeded, Nuvoli went on a hunger strike earlier this month to draw attention to his plight.
Nuvoli's doctor Tommaso Ciacca attempted on July 7 to switch off his respirator but was stopped by police at the last minute.
Ciacca, an anaesthetist, said on Tuesday that "Giovanni wasn't asking for euthanasia. He was asking for something that thousands of other terminally ill patients in this country want: the suspension of treatment which only produces and prolongs their suffering".
Nuvoli's death came on the day that an anaesthetist who helped a terminally ill man end his life was cleared of "consensual murder" charges in a 'right-to-die' case which had split the country.
A Rome judge ruled that Mario Riccio committed no crime last December when he sedated Piergiorgio Welby and unplugged his respirator.
Welby, 51, suffered from the same disease as Nuvoli and had long been asking to die a "dignified death". A Rome court and a health ministry panel both turned down his request.
While the centre left hailed the court's decision to acquit Riccio, several members of the centre-right opposition said it had set a "dangerous precedent" and blasted the sentence as "tantamount to condoning mercy killing".
Some Catholic sections of the opposition have vowed to battle any bill on living wills, arguing that it is an attempt to legalise euthanasia through the back door.
They take the Catholic Church's line that euthanasia is never acceptable.
The Church has said it is against any form of living will, saying in effect that a person cannot decide in one stage of his life what will be right at another stage.
Isabella Bertolini, a top member of opposition chief Silvio Berlusconi's Forza Italia party, said that "the centre left is continuing to exploit cases like that of Welby and Nuvoli to spread a culture of death... We will fight any living will bill which is a Trojan's horse for legalising euthanasia".
Polls carried out at the height of the Welby case debate showed that a majority of Italians believed complying with his wishes was right and that they did not see it as suicide or euthanasia.
