A dozen protesters were injured in clashes with police on Friday and Saturday outside the site in the northwest Chiaiano suburb, while three were arrested.

Protesters who barricaded the road leading to the site, a disused quarry with an estimated capacity for some 700,000 tonnes of rubbish, agreed to end their blockade after negotiations with Salvatore Perrotta, the mayor of nearby Marano.

Regional and government environmental experts equipped with drills were seen entering the quarry early Tuesday to take soil and rock samples for evaluation.

Residents are concerned that the site is too close to a hospital complex located 1.6 kilometres (a mile) away, one of the local experts, Aldo Loris Rossi, told the ANSA news agency.

His colleague Giovanbattista De Medici said he had "always advised against creating a dump in a quarry because it involves a very difficult process of sealing" the ground and walls.

Their analysis will take around two weeks to complete.

Also Tuesday, a Naples newspaper reported that the city's chief officer Alessandro Pansa has been named in a probe into suspected racketeering connected with the crisis.

Pansa, Rome's representative in the southern city, served as special commissioner for the chronic problem for six months last year.

The investigation deals with waste trafficking and fraud, the daily Il Mattino reported, adding that Pansa was among 26 people named in the probe.

The other 25 were placed under house arrest, Il Mattino said.

A "waste disposal state of emergency" has been renewed annually in the impoverished Naples region since 1994.

Tens of thousands of tonnes of rubbish have piled up in and around Naples in recent months as the Campania area's existing dumps have filled to capacity.

Regional and national experts will examine 10 sites selected by the central government as potential new dumps.

"The state cannot give up, the problem of the rubbish must be resolved," Italy's new right-wing Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi said on Saturday.

A long meeting Sunday between Guido Bertolaso, the junior minister appointed to tackle the crisis, and the 10 local authorities affected by the government decree offered signs of progress including a temporary truce.

Under Berlusconi's order last week, the 10 new dumps were to be declared military zones and guarded by the army.

The crisis has been blamed in large part on the local Camorra mafia, who have infiltrated the lucrative waste disposal industry over the last 20 years, shipping industrial waste from the north and dumping it illegally in and around Naples.

But other reasons for the chronic overflow include lack of space at existing dumps, the lack of an incinerator in the Campania region, and a dysfunctional system for sorting recyclable waste.

On Tuesday, about 60 trucks loaded with rubbish prepared to roll onto a barge headed for Sardinia.

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