Blessed by Pope, flame starts Italian journey

Blessed by the Pope, the Olympic flame for the 2006 Winter Games started a two-month journey across Italy yesterday with torchbearers snaking past Rome's most famous monuments to cheers from tourists and residents.

"May this flame remind everybody of the values of peace and brotherhood that are the basis of the Olympics," Pope Benedict told a large crowd gathered in St Peter's Square, as torchbearers held the flame under his window.

Italy's President Carlo Azeglio Ciampi had earlier lit up the torch and handed it to Olympic marathon champion Stefano Baldini, the first of 10,000 torchbearers who will carry it through an 11,000-km (6,835-mile) relay from Sicily to the border with Austria.

The Games, which start in Turin on February 10, are the first Italy has hosted since 1960.

On its way to the Vatican the aluminium and steel torch, created by renowned Ferrari car designer Pininfarina, passed by Rome's landmarks, from the Spanish Steps to the Pantheon.

"It's a beautiful and really emotional moment," said Emanuela Musco, standing on a small wall at the Trevi Fountain.

The relay will continue in Rome today, with soccer players Fran-cesco Totti, of Roma, and Paolo Di Canio, of city rivals Lazio, each carrying the torch before it passes through the Cinecitta set where Fellini shot some of his best known films.

The blue torch, which weighs less than two kilogrammes and looks like the curved top of a ski, cannot be re-lit and is designed not to go out in rain, snow and wind.

After leaving Rome it will reach all of Italy's provinces from the southern island of Lampedusa to the Alps, passing by the Leaning Tower of Pisa, cruising on a gondola up Venice's Grand Canal and riding in a Ferrari in Maranello.

Organisers hope the cross-country journey will help revive sluggish ticket sales.

Celebrations have been marred by an ongoing protest in the Alpine Val di Susa, one of the main routes linking Turin to the Olympics mountain sites, against a planned high-speed railway line connecting Italy and France.

Protesters, who say the so-called TAV project may release harmful deposits of asbestos in the mountains, repeatedly clashed with police this week, blocking roads and railways near Turin and covering the city's building with graffiti like "No to the high-speed train, No to the Olympics."

"The Olympics are not for or against the TAV. They are just two problems that coincide," the head of the organising committee, Valen-tino Castellani, told Corriere della Sera daily.

"Let's take a break and think - violent solutions are not productive," he said.

In Rome, one 50-year old woman said she had been put off by the protest.

"I like the Olympics, but with all that's going on in Val di Susa, I'll watch it on TV," she said.