Italy's interior minister has said he will take immediate action to tackle the country's "security emergency".
Roberto Maroni, who belongs to the anti-immigrant Northern League, pledged to bolster the resources available for Italy's police and security services.
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Earlier this week people in Naples set fire to makeshift homes of Roma - or Gypsy - families, forcing them to flee.
The eruption of violence followed a report that a Roma girl allegedly attempted to kidnap an Italian baby.
"It is time to intervene with force to prevent anger taking over... and to avoid episodes of the unjustifiable violence that we saw in Naples," Mr Maroni said.
Crackdown
The minister added that the country "demands immediate and efficient answers from all political forces... working together to resolve the problems afflicting our communities".
The government is also considering replacing single police officers with teams of security officials - including soldiers - to patrol the streets, according to Italian newspaper reports.
Mr Maroni's comments come a day after Italian authorities announced that they had arrested nearly 400 suspected illegal immigrants during a week-long series of raids across the country.
The police crackdown took place in the capital, Rome, as well as Naples and northern Italian cities.
Makeshift camps housing Roma, in both Rome and Naples were targeted and immigrants from Romania, but also Albania, Greece, China and Morocco, were arrested.
The move is an apparent sign of the change of policy promised by the new right-wing government of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.
On Thursday, Mr Maroni sought to reassure his Romanian counterpart that Italy was not unfairly discriminating against Romanians.
"There is no problem with the Romanian community," he said, adding that the government would focus only on: "those who commit crimes, regardless of their citizenship".
(BBC)
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