Italian warships have rescued 290 migrants in the Mediterranean and Sicily declared a state of emergency as Rome launched a huge patrol operation to scare off people-smugglers.
Drones, warships and helicopters were deployed inside and outside Italian waters following two tragic shipwrecks this month in which more than 400 Eritrean, Somali and Syrian refugees drowned.
Hi-tech radars and night-vision equipment are also being used by Italian forces in the operation, named Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - the term used by the ancient Romans to refer to the Mediterranean.
The navy has dispatched five warships to patrol what Italian Prime Minister Enrico Letta has called the "sea of death", and said on Tuesday that it had rescued 290 migrants near the island of Lampedusa, Italy's southernmost territory.
An Italian cargo ship also helped the Greek coastguard rescue 73 Syrians stranded on a yacht in the Ionian Sea after it ran out of fuel.
News that makes sense
Your trusted source for staying up-to-date with the world around you. Get free daily news updates and analysis, straight to your inbox.
And a Panamanian merchant vessel picked up about 80 people adrift on a large raft in Libyan waters and took them to Sicily, the coastguard said.
Following a call for aid via satellite phone, the Italian coastguard asked a Liberian merchant ship to change course to help about 100 people in Libyan waters, while another ship came to the aid of a dinghy with 90 people on board in Maltese waters.
Sicily's regional assembly, meanwhile, approved an emergency decree that governor Rosario Crocetta said would speed up security measures to deal with the growing influx of refugees on the island.
The latest arrivals come on top of the 32,000 asylum seekers that the United Nations refugee agency says have landed in Italy and Malta so far this year.
Most leave from an increasingly lawless Libya and arrive on tiny Lampedusa, where the local refugee centre is often severely overcrowded.
