Italian premier denounces anti-semitic graffiti

Italian Premier Romano Prodi on Tuesday denounced a swastika and other graffiti scrawled on walls in a Jewish neighborhood in Rome overnight, when huge crowds of soccer fans were in the streets to celebrate the nation's World Cup triumph. Some of the graffiti was painted on a wall near outdoor tables of a trattoria along the main street of the Old Ghetto, as the neighborhood is known. Prodi condemned the anti-Semitic graffiti in a letter to the president of the Union of the Italian Jewish Communities.