Italian City Scurries to Prepare for Flood of Albanians : Refugees: Tourists, troops and volunteers brace for the boat-lift. Up to 5,000 people are expected at Brindisi’s port.

An international legion of bronzed backpackers braved vacation plans gone astray. Rail workers marshaled three of the longest trains ever seen in peacetime Europe.

A platoon of Italian soldiers swapped its weapons for wire-cutters and weed-trimmers. A Calabrian bishop in the Italian boot hustled volunteer interpreters toward Brindisi from villages where Albanian has survived for centuries as a local dialect.

Thus did this Adriatic port, and Italy with it, prepare Thursday for its first direct encounter with the human consequences of collapsing communism in Eastern Europe.

After watching, riveted for months, as a geography-insulated spectator while revolutionary winds swept the East, Italy has been brought center stage by trauma in Albania, a distant neighbor across the Adriatic.

Italian, French and German officials increased a boat-lift flotilla from three vessels to five Thursday after it became clear that more Albanians than originally thought were taking refuge inside their embassies in the Albanian capital, Tirana.

In all, officials expected between 4,500 and 5,000 Albanians to embark on the five chartered ferries late Thursday. The ships are due here this morning.

Albania’s Communist leaders, scrambling to maintain control of Europe’s last stubbornly Stalinist state, agreed to the refugee exodus but ordered that it come in the dead of night from the port of Durres, about 20 miles from Tirana.

West Germany alone expects 3,200 refugees, who have been dangerously jammed inside its embassy, according to Friedrich W. Catoir, a German spokesman here. One of the refugees was born Wednesday at the embassy. A number of others require medical attention, Catoir said.

Three special trains stocked with food, medical personnel and German border police wound their way from Germany, through Austria and down the Italian peninsula to this port about 335 miles southeast of Rome on Thursday.

The plan was for them to leave almost immediately for Germany with refugees aboard two chartered ferries that will dock about 100 yards from the train station.

To accommodate them, European rules on the size of international trains have been waived for the trip. The German locomotives will pull nearly twice as many carriages as are usually seen in Europe.

About 500 refugees are expected on the ferry Orient Star chartered by France from a company in Greece. Officials said the ferry would call briefly here and then continue with the refugees to a French port, probably Marseilles.

Italian officials here said they thought the ferries might also bring about 500 Albanians who had found asylum in seven other foreign embassies in Tirana in a stampede that began June 28.

To accommodate the influx, port officials ordered Brindisi closed to commercial maritime traffic today, Prefect Giuseppe Mazzitello said. That will mean delays for the hundreds of European and American tourists who wandered through the port with backpacks and bottles of mineral water awaiting passage to Greece.

Lolling in the sun, they seemed neither particularly aware of the preparations around them, nor upset at the prospect of delay.

For its part, Italy expects about 800 refugees from its embassy. Near the San Vito U.S. Air Base outside of town, a disused Italian army depot was being overhauled Thursday to accommodate them and up to 400 others. The Albanians were to remain there less than a week before being resettled around Italy, Mazzitello said.

Under the broiling sun at the camp Thursday, soldiers installed cots, bathrooms and big kitchens. They whacked weeds, painted all that did not move and clambered in brilliant yellow gloves atop foreboding walls to hack at rusty rolls of barbed wire.

The Cold War wire, meant to keep out enemies, had been left to discourage thieves and vandals. Clearly, it would not do for refugees from the tail thrash of dying communism.

“We’re taking down the wire because we don’t want it to look like a concentration camp,” said Italian army Lt. Col. Michele Dodde.