Tens of thousands of students and academics took to the streets of Rome to protest massive cuts in Italy`s higher education budget on Friday to coincide with a nationwide university strike.

The Italian capital was brought to a standstill by two separate marches -- one by high school and university students and the other by university faculty and researchers -- amid a heavy police presence as a helicopter circled overhead.

To the beat of reggae music and behind a banner proclaiming `Together for the Country`s Future,` protesters holding colourful balloons marched against a plan to cut some 1.4 billion euros (1.8 billion dollars) from funding for universities and research institutes over the next five years.

`Hands off public schools, universities and research,` one banner urged the centre-right government of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi that took office in May.

`These are not university reforms the government is proposing,` said protester Claudio Gatti, a researcher at the National Nuclear Physics Institute.

`The mandarins, who cost the most, will stay in the system and the vulnerable youth -- the life force of research and universities -- will be left out,` Gatti, 35, told AFP.

Italy`s three main unions called the national higher education strike several weeks ago, but one, the Catholic-oriented CISL, announced Wednesday that it was pulling out of the action after meeting with Education Minister Mariastella Gelmini.

The minister sought to assure the young protesters that she sympathised with their cause and was trying to help them.

`I say to all these young people that I understand their upset and share their concerns. I am by their side,` she said in an interview with the daily La Repubblica. `I was a student too, and I was worried about my future.`

Gelmini said she was committed to `education that encourages the talents of young people, that offers them real opportunities to study and obtain worthwhile diplomas in the world of work.`

The higher education strike was observed in several Italian cities, the ANSA news agency reported, adding that protests were held in the Sardinian capital Cagliari, the northern economic hub Milan, northwestern Genoa and Palermo, in Sicily.

On October 30 more than 100,000 people protested in Rome against planned cuts to primary school education.