THE Winter Olympic Games in Turin are at risk, Italy said yesterday, as protests by tens of thousands of people against the construction of an Alpine high-speed rail link turned violent.

Silvio Berlusconi, the Prime Minister, will hold an emergency Cabinet meeting today in an attempt to avert disaster.

“We need a truce to save the Olympics,” Valentino Castellani, the head of the Italian organising committee for the Winter Games, declared as the Olympic flame left Rome for Turin yesterday.

Eighty per cent of the events in the 20th Winter Games, which run from February 10 to 26, are being staged not in Turin itself but in the nearby Val Di Susa, which is the centre of the protests against a new rail tunnel through the mountains.

The area, normally a picturesque winter playground of peaks, snow and hairpin bends, this week turned into a bloody battleground between demonstrators and riot police, with teargas drifting across the Alpine scenery.

Dozens of protesters and police have been injured. Roads and motorways have been blocked, cutting off not only Olympic sites but also ski resorts. Police said that the number of protesters had swollen to 40,000.

The demonstrations were begun by local residents opposed on environmental grounds to the 33-mile (53km) tunnel, part of a high-speed line that will link Turin and Lyons and eventually run from Lisbon to Kiev.

They fear that tunnelling through asbestos and uranium deposits will cause long-term health risks as well as damage the landscape, and say that existing rail lines could be developed instead.

But Signor Berlusconi said that the demonstrators had been infiltrated by “at least a thousand subversive hardline anarchists” from Italy and other parts of Europe.

Signor Castellani, the Italian Olympic chief, noted that the Games were barely 60 days away, and he told Corriere della Sera: “I am very worried.”

He said that Val di Susa was under siege, with television images of the clashes broadcast around the world, and added: “It would take only a handful of violent protesters to disrupt the Games.” Some town mayors in Val di Susa were already writing the Games off, “and I can understand that”.

Sergio Chiamparino, the Mayor of Turin, said: “We are dealing with a serious emergency that is becoming more dramatic by the minute.”

The Italian Interior Ministry said that the demonstrations had been inflamed by anti- globalisation protesters, just as they were at the G8 summit in Genoa in 2001. On Thursday night protesters overwhelmed police cordons to invade the engineering works at Venaus, the entrance to the planned tunnel, smashing contruction equipment and huts.

The crisis meeting at Signor Berlusconi’s office today will involve police chiefs, Olympic officials, local mayors and the heads of the Piedmont region and the province of Turin.

Signor Berlusconi insisted that the railway was “a project we cannot simply abandon”, and his aides said that although genuine environmental concerns could be addressed there could be no compromise with violent hardliners.

The crisis has caused a Cabinet rift with Pietro Lunardi, the Transport Minister, who owns an engineering company involved in the tunnel project and is under pressure to resign, accusing Giuseppe Pisanu, the Interior Minister, of failing to guarantee “law and order”.

Signor Pisanu retorted that Signor Lunardi had failed to foresee the crisis, even though protests had been building for months.

Despite the dispute the Olympic flame left Rome for Turin yesterday after being lit by President Ciampi and blessed by the Pope as a symbol of peace and brotherhood. It will be carried in a 64-day relay by 10,000 torchbearers on an 11,000km route. One of the torchbearers, Stefano Baldini, an Italian athlete who won a gold medal at the Athens Olympics, said: “I hope there will be a truce, because Italy’s image in the world is at stake.”

Jacques Rogge, President of the International Olympic Committee, said that he hoped a solution would be found.

Ski resort managers at Sauze d’Oulx, Sestriere and other top resorts in the “Milky Way” (Via Lattea) — popular with British skiers — said that bookings were down by 80 per cent, posing a “disaster” for tourism. The resorts expect to lose more than €1 million (£673,500) in revenue this weekend, which traditionally marks the start of the ski season in the Alps. Christmas markets and light ceremonies on streets have been abandoned.

Roberto Termini, the director of the Sestriere resort, said: “Many people have been put off. There’s no one here. It’s a terrible shame — the snow is fantastic.”

OLYMPIC RECORD

• The Turin Games feature 84 events over 17 days
• A budget of €3.5 billion includes 65 projects, including infrastructure, the Olympic village and a 35,000-seat stadium developed from the old Stadio Communale
• Competitors from a record 85 nations are scheduled to participate