Thick snowflakes fell in Rome today, a rare sight for city usually blessed by a temperate climate.

The snowfall prompted authorities to stop visitors from entering the Coliseum, the Roman Forum and the Palatine Hill, the former home of Rome's ancient emperors.

The director of the Coliseum, Rossella Rea, said the sites were closed out of fears that visitors could slip on ice.

The last substantial snowfalls in Rome were in 1985 and 1986, though there have been other cases of lighter snow since then, including in 2010.

Snow began falling in the late morning, leaving a light dusting on trees and cars and forming slush on the roads. The north of Italy has also been gripped by snow and ice that is disrupting train travel.

Temperatures plunged as low as -22C, in Trepalle, a village in the Italian Alps.

Meanwhile in Ukraine, 38 more people died as freezing weather gripped the country.

The death toll over the past week now stands at 101.

The Emergency Situations Ministry said more than 1,200 other people have been treated in hospital for hypothermia and frostbite as temperatures in some parts of the country sank to -32C.

Authorities have closed schools and colleges and set up nearly 3,000 heating and food shelters across the country. Health officials instructed hospitals not to discharge homeless patients, even after treatment is finished, to save them from the cold.

Experts said the high death toll reflects the country's inability to deal with the homeless.

There have been dozens of death elsewhere in Eastern Europe with thousands of villagers trapped by heavy snow and blizzards in Serbia.

The stranded people live in homes in remote mountainous areas.

Many of the dead have been homeless people unable to find shelter.

Parts of the Black Sea froze near the Romanian coastline and there was a rare snowfall on Croatian islands in the Adriatic Sea. In Bulgaria, 16 towns recorded their lowest temperatures since records started 100 years ago.