In one month's time, Italy will host one of the biggest sports events in the world.

Not that you would notice.

Ticket sales for the 2006 Winter Olympics in Turin are sluggish. Marketing has been lukewarm. The Olympic torch has criss-crossed half of Italy without causing much excitement, and has been booed by political protesters.

Organisers have worked hard to complete the Alpine tracks, Turin's ice rinks and Olympic villages in time - but now that the building work is done, they're facing a lack of enthusiasm.

A cash shortage is partly to blame, organisers say.

TOROC, the local Olympic committee, has seen its budget shrink in a series of financial crises due to lower-than-expected sponsorship, and most recently due to a cut in government contributions.

As a result, there has been little money for advertising, and last year a party marking the 100-day countdown to the Games had to be cancelled.

Some 585,000 tickets out of one million have been sold, well short of TOROC's target of 850,000 and not much changed from November, before the launch of the torch's journey.

Ticket revenues are closer to the aim at 77 percent of a targeted 76 million euro ($A122.11 million) .

Only around 200,000 of those tickets have been sold in sports-mad Italy, mostly in the wealthy northern regions close to the Alps, where parents put their children on skis as soon as they can walk. Italians in the warmer, poorer south haven't paid much attention to the Winter extravaganza.

Where pro-Olympic campaigns have failed to stir up strong emotions, critical protests have had more success.

Activists campaigning for a boycott of Coca-Cola, official sponsor of the Olympics, have tried to block the Olympic torch in cities from northern Genoa to southern Potenza.

They accuse Coke of turning a blind eye to human rights violations at one of its bottling plants in Colombia, which the company has denied.

Up to 30,000-strong marches through the valley of Val di Susa, which connects the Olympic venues, have also added political worries to the event.

Residents and environmentalists oppose the planned construction of a high-speed railway link between Italy and France that would cut through the valley. There have been violent clashes between some of the protesters and police.

Finally, metal workers in Turin have threatened to protest on the narrow, twisting Alpine roads to the venues if their demands in a wage dispute are not met, newspapers have reported.

Such a move could bring much of the Games to a standstill.

The roads linking ski resorts such as Sestriere, the bobsleigh track at Cesana and Turin are vulnerable to traffic jams, and security checks and bad weather could cause further delays.

The International Olympic Committee warned TOROC during its last visit in November that it would have to improve its transport plan, making sure visitors came prepared.

TOROC is launching a local campaign telling drivers to switch to public transport. It remains to be seen whether the message reaches foreign visitors.

Despite these organisational snags, Italy has something to be cheerful about: sport.

Italian slalom king Giorgio Rocca won his fourth straight World Cup slalom race on Sunday, while his compatriot Armin Zoeggeler has gold medal hopes for the luge race.

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