Italy's honorary consulates will soon open in a number of cities in Ukraine and Crimea, Italian Ambassador to Ukraine Fabrizio Romano has said.

"We decided to open an honorary consulate in Odesa. The next are Donetsk, Dnipropetrovsk, Kharkiv and Crimea. We also opened a special visa center, which cooperates with us and collects documents. This is a huge relief for people who are traveling to Italy," the ambassador said in an interview with the Komsomolskaya Pravda v Ukraine newspaper, which was published on Tuesday.

He also said that there were no serious problems with the issuing of visas to Ukrainian citizens in 2012.

"The embassy has not stopped issuing visas. There were delays for technical reasons. We only managed to get a new program for processing visa documents, and its launch led to the cancelation of some meetings already scheduled in the visa section. This unpleasant fact coincided with the peak load on the embassy," Romano said.

He noted that the visa center currently faces serious improvements - "the level of complaints actually fell to zero from September to April."

"Earlier, it took over ten days to get a visa, and now we consider an application for at most a week," the diplomat said.

As for the interest of Ukrainians in Italy as a tourist destination, the ambassador said: "This year 35-40 percent more of your citizens have already arrived in the Apennines. Ukrainians fell in love with Italy as a holiday destination."

In addition, he said, Ukraine has become more popular among tourists after Euro 2012: "It got a great reputation. Ukrainians are friendly people. Everything went fine ... I hope that one day the Italians will discover your country as a destination for mass tourism."