A powerful earthquake shook Italy’s industrial and densely populated northeast early yesterday, killing at least six people, felling homes and factories and reducing historic buildings to rubble.

Authorities said the quake’s epicentre was the commune of Finale Emilia, 36 kilometres north of Bologna, at a depth of only 5.1 kilometres.

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

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

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 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.

Italian TV 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 communal 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, also collapsed, an industry official said.

The roof of a recently renovated sixth-century chapel in San Carlo, near Ferrara, caved in, exposing statues of angels to the elements.

Claudio Fabbri, a 37-year-old architect, said the restoration had taken eight years. “Now there’s nothing left to do,” he said despondently.

In March 2009, a 6.3 magnitude quake devastated the central city of l’Aquila, killing some 300 people and leaving tens of thousands homeless.