Italy fears “another Calais” on its border with France as desperate migrants and refugees are thwarted in their bid to cross the frontier and reach northern Europe.

Tighter border controls by the French authorities have created a bottleneck around the Italian town of Ventimiglia, just a few miles from the French border.

The Italians are trying to transfer migrants and refugees to reception centres in other parts of the country in order to prevent the development of ramshackle camps such as the notorious ‘Jungle’ in Calais and the tent village that sprung up earlier this year at Idomeni, along the border between Greece and Macedonia.

“Our border with France will not become another Calais,” Angelino Alfano, the Italian interior minister, told La Repubblica newspaper.