Police evacuated dozens of residents from a suburb of the northern coastal city of Savona overnight Thursday as a blaze engulfed large swathes of a forested hillside nearby.

Doctors treated many for smoke inhalation and eye irritations.

Aircraft bombarded the hills with water early Friday in a bid to halt the flames, which engulfed a car used by civil protection officials. There were no reports of injuries or of an immediate threat to dwellings.

Meanwhile, an inferno which raged in the hills above the port city of Genoa on Thursday was brought under control. An estimated 300 people who had to be evacuated were allowed to return to their smoke-damaged homes.

"The situation is under control," said Italy's civil protection chief Guido Bertolaso.

"Our strategy has allowed us to avoid the more critical situations faced by Portugal, Spain and France," he said after a meeting of officials in Rome to assess the situation following almost a week of fighting fires.

Elsewhere, the highway linking Genoa with the town of Ventimiglia on the French border was shut for several hours early Friday because of encroaching flames and smoke from a fiercely burning brush fire.

Hundreds of firefighters, forestry workers and volunteers were deployed to fight the blaze, which ravaged hundreds of acres of brush and trees.

In the same area on Thursday, about 100 people were evacuated from a Roma camp threatened by encroaching flames.

Officials said Canadair water-carrying planes and a helicopter were being used Friday to battle a fresh wildfire at another Italian tourist treasure, the Monte Argentario national park in Tuscany.

The fire was among dozens still raging early Friday after several days of constant blazes in several regions of Italy. Police believe many of the blazes, which have hit Liguria and Tuscany the most, have been started by arsonists.

One youth was arrested near the scene of a fire in Tuscany on Wednesday, and police in Genoa issued an identikit picture of a suspect seen setting a fire near the city on Thursday.

The chief of the national parks authority for the Tuscan archipelago, Ruggero Barbetti, said he believed that a huge blaze which destroyed 800 hectares (around 2,000 acres) of scrubland and forestry on the southern part of island of Elba had been started deliberately.

But he ruled out the involvement of unscrupulous property developers who could use the excuse of vast tracts of charred forest as a pretext to circumvent building restrictions.

"I tend to believe that it was the action of a disturbed individual, but I don't believe it was something organised," he said.

Environment Minister Altero Matteoli is expected to visit the island to survey the damage soon.

A regional agricultural official in Tuscany, Tito Barbini, told the ANSA news agency that fires which destroyed 1,500 hectares of brush and forestry in the past few days had been "malicious" in origin.

TERRA.WIRE