ROME -- - Massive Power Failure Sweeps Across Italy

ROME -- A power failure left most of Italy without electricity for several hours recently, interrupting rail and air traffic, jamming emergency phone lines for hours and forcing thousands of Romans into makeshift refuges in subway stations.

At least three people died as a direct result of the blackout, including two elderly women who fell down stairs in separate incidents and another who died from burns caused when a candle set her clothes on fire.

Industry Minister Antonio Marzano said the Italian electrical grid was not to blame for the power failure, which left nearly 57 million people in the dark. He said an investigation into the cause would begin immediately.

The national grid operator, G.R.T.N., attributed the blackout to a chain reaction that possibly began in Switzerland, and involved France and Austria before crippling electrical power in Italy.

Most of Italy — except for the islands of Sardinia and Capri and several limited areas on the mainland — was hit by the blackout, which began at about 3:20 a.m. Power came back to most northern regions in the early morning hours, in some cases before residents even awakened.

Restoring power proved to be more problematic in the central and southern regions, where several areas remained without electricity tonight.

Though no major incidents were reported during the night and hospital generators kept equipment running, dozens of people up and down the peninsula were caught in elevators, some areas were without water, at least 30,000 people were stranded on 110 trains, and thousands more were caught in subways and on streetcars.

In Rome, the blackout coincided with an all-night cultural extravaganza called White Night that included dozens of performances and nighttime visits to museums, galleries and monuments. The program had lured more than one million people onto the streets of the capital, according to the mayor's office.

Shortly before the power went out, with the huge number of people in the streets, traffic had already ground to a standstill when it began to rain. When the power failed, places that had kept their doors open were forced to shoo visitors out for security reasons, and a ghostly legion of wet and bedraggled nocturnal revelers found themselves stranded on the streets.

About 12,000 people took refuge in Rome's subway stations, which had remained open all night for the event. The civil protection agency sent messages to Roman cellphones asking residents to remain home unless absolutely necessary.

"People panicked because of the rain," said Lorenzo Lisi, who worked all night at the Taverna del Campo in a downtown Rome square, describing the scene as "apocalyptic." "Then when people began going home, so did the police, and we had to barricade ourselves inside as people banged on the door."

Andrea Bollino, president of G.R.T.N., said on national television that some limited power failures might continue on Monday and that the grid would be fully operational again by Tuesday. He asked Italians to use electrical power sparingly until then. "If we all do our part, there will be more for everyone," he said.

An official with G.R.T.N. said the blackout seemed to have been caused by a domino effect that started when a tree interfered with a power line in Switzerland, putting it out of service as French lines were damaged by a storm raging in southeastern France.

The two events, in combination, virtually isolated Italy, but the official said this reconstruction was still preliminary and warranted closer examination.

France and Switzerland have confirmed that their power lines were disabled, but categorically refused to accept responsibility for the blackout and dismissed the chain reaction theory.

Rolf Schmid, chief of corporate communications at ATEL, one of the Swiss providers, said the kind of interruption experienced in Switzerland at 3 a.m. on Sunday, nearly half an hour before the Italian blackout, was a common occurrence of which consumers almost never became aware.

"Which is why we can't say that it was an interruption in the Swiss line, otherwise breakdowns would be more common," he said in a phone interview from his office in Olten, Switzerland. He said he suspected that Italian operators had made a wrong decision when coping with the interruption from Switzerland and the difficulties in France. "The Italian reaction was not the right one, and it cost them the chain reaction," he said.

Italy imports nearly 17 percent of its electricity from abroad, its principal suppliers being France and Switzerland, where costs are about a third of those of Italian production. Criticisms emerged today that dependence on foreign imports left the country vulnerable to this kind of emergency.

The office of Paolo Scaroni, the chief executive officier of ENEL, Italy's former national electricity utility — which called 10,000 employees into work after the power failure — quoted him as saying Italy's basic problem was that it depended excessively on imported energy, The Associated Press reported.

In visit to Naples, President Carlo Azeglio Ciampi urged that politics be set aside to ensure that the country build new power stations "to give the country the sources of energy it needs."

There have been major power failures in London, Denmark and Sweden in the last two months, and on Aug. 14, 50 million people were left without power in the United States and Canada. Losses incurred by that power failure have not yet all been calculated, but it is estimated that New York City alone lost more than $1 billion.