TORCHING cars and motorbikes in quiet residential areas is the latest craze to hit Rome.

In the past month 76 parked cars and 104 motorcycles have been set ablaze during the night, with engines exploding and flames damaging buildings. Heat has cracked windows as high as the third floor of apartment blocks, causing anger among residents, who have been going into the streets in their nightclothes to find cars reduced to smouldering ruins.

“Our nerves are already on edge because of the terrorist threat,” one woman said as she surveyed the shell of her Fiat, “and I haven’t even finished paying for the car.”

Police say that gangs are responsible for the crime wave as yob culture intensifies. “We thought at first we were dealing with a lone pyromaniac,” Colonel Salvatore Luongo, the Carabiniere officer leading the investigation, said, “but there are gangs roaming around at night setting vehicles on fire.”

Police and residents feared at first that the night explosions were terrorist acts. Police say that the arsonists pour petrol on car bonnets, throw lighted matches and escape on scooters as the fires spread and petrol tanks explode. Colonel Luongo said that vehicle arson was a new and disturbing phenomenon. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” he said, adding that a number of fires seemed to be copycat incidents.

Arson in Italy is normally confined to forest fires in the summer — 108 such incidents were recorded last week alone.

Giulio Castelli, head of the residents’ association in Rome’s historic centre, said that the spate of attacks was a reflection of “a general trend towards yobbishness” in Italy. He said that there was an increase in drunkenness among Italian youths, especially in piazzas lined with late-night bars. Youths have taken to using battery-powered megaphones to hail each other, making sleep impossible.

Police said that the disturbances were more than midsummer madness and reflected a rise in anti-social behaviour.

The hooliganism is at odds with the traditional image of Italian youths, who have a reputation of rarely drinking to excess and are thought more likely to chat up girls while draped elegantly over their Vespas than get involved in violence.Germana Cesarano, who runs a Rome social centre to help youngsters with alcohol or drugs problems, said that binge drinking had made in-roads in a society where in the past wine or beer was drunk only with meals, and then in moderation. A Health Ministry study said the average age at which Italians start drinking alcohol was just over 11, compared with an EU average age of 14½.

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