FERRARA (Italy), May 20: A powerful earthquake shook Italy’s industrial and densely populated northeast early on Sunday, killing at least six people, felling homes and factories and reducing historic buildings to rubble.

Emergency services said dozens had been injured in the magnitude 6.0 quake, which struck in the early hours of Sunday, sending thousands of people running into the streets in towns and cities across the Emilia Romagna region.

Prime Minister Mario Monti was to return early from the United States, where he was attending a Nato summit.

Emergency workers were sifting through the rubble of collapsed buildings for victims hours after the quake and several aftershocks struck at 0200GMT.

Four of the dead were night-shift workers in factories which collapsed, including two who were crushed when the roof of a ceramics factory caved in the town of Sant’Agostino.

A 37-year-old German woman and another woman aged over 100 reportedly died from shock.

The quake caused significant damage to historic buildings as it rattled the cities of Bologna, Ferrara, Verona and Mantua, Italy’s culture ministry said.

“According to first reports, damage to the cultural heritage is significant,” the ministry said, adding that it was carrying out “more detailed verifications with firemen and the civil defence service”.

Italian television showed many historic buildings, including churches, reduced to rubble. Cars were crushed under falling masonry, and the Civil Protection Agency evacuated hundreds of elderly and vulnerable people to makeshift shelters in Finale Emilia and towns near the epicentre.

Warehouses storing more than 300,000 wheels of Parmesan and Grana Padano, a similar cheese, with an estimated value of more than 250 million euros ($320 million), also collapsed, an industry official said.

The roof of a recently renovated sixth-century chapel in San Carlo, near Ferrara, caved in.

Hospitals were evacuated as a precautionary measure and about 3,000 people have been evacuated from their homes. A 5.1 magnitude aftershock struck in the afternoon, forcing the collapse of several structures already weakened, with a fire-fighter left seriously injured after falling from a wall.

Yet in a show of calm nerves, officials opened polls as planned for the second round of local elections in the cities of Piacenza, Parma, Budrio and Comacchio.—AFP