PADUA is renowned for its ancient university and medieval frescoes by Giotto. Yesterday, however, it acquired a less attractive claim to fame: a steel wall, 84m long and 3m high, blocking off a run-down housing estate with a high immigrant population and a reputation for drugs, violence and prostitution.

The wall was erected overnight by the local council around a cluster of run-down apartment blocks housing 1,500 people that is known as the Padua Bronx. A police checkpoint has been set up to control access to and from the estate. The council said that the wall had cost €80,000 (£54,000).

Some reports said, however, that the operation — including the installation of CCTV — costs as much as €270,000. Italian newspapers said that “a new Berlin Wall has gone up — this time in the heart of Italy”.

Il Giornale compared the Padua wall to the fence dividing Israel from the West Bank. La Repubblica ran the headline: “Padua is divided in two.”

Police said that the flats — on what is officially the Serenissima (Most Serene) estate — had once been occupied by students, but over the past decade had been taken over by immigrants from Africa, including the Maghreb, Asia and Eastern Europe. “Many of them are illegal immigrants,” a police spokesman said. “There is a serious drugs problem .”

Police raided several flats at dawn yesterday, arresting ten clandestini (illegal immigrants) and seizing hundreds of grammes of cocaine. Last month police used teargas to quell street fighting between nearly 200 Nigerians and Moroccans, and confiscated weapons including machetes and meat cleavers.

The wall was condemned by Giancarlo Galan, the centre-right President of the Veneto Region, as a “policy of despair”. He said that it amounted to an admission of failure by Padua’s centre-left council.

Signor Zanonato said that he preferred “enclosure” to wall. “People are comparing us to Berlin, or even Beirut,” he said. “But there are 20,000 immigrants in Padua. My task is to do what is possible to integrate them. But this enclosure was requested by residents near the estate, to stop drug dealing.”

CITY TOUR

Has busy commercial centre that has attracted immigrant workers, largely of North African and Eastern European origin

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