"We hope very much that the measures that have been applied so far will solve the crisis at the moment," commission spokeswoman Barbara Helfferich told journalists in Brussels.

"But the structural problems are not yet resolved with that and we hope that Italy will take measures to propose adequate management plans very quickly," she added.

Earlier this month, the commission filed a lawsuit with an EU court against Italy after finding that the previous government had taken "inadequate" measures to tackle the mountains of rubbish on the streets of Naples and the surrounding region of Campania.

Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi announced Wednesday that rubbish dumps in Naples would be declared "military zones" and guarded by troops, in a bid to resolve the city's waste crisis.

Tens of thousands of tonnes of untreated waste have piled up in and around Naples in recent months as a 14-year problem over a lack of incinerators reaches a new peak.

Berlusconi said the government had identified five new sites in the Naples region that would be used as garbage dumps, and added that their location would be made public in the coming days.

The commission spokeswoman said that the European Union's executive arm would look into whether the new measures "comply with EU legislation."

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