A 22-year-old neo-Nazi who was inspired by US white suprematist groups and Hitler's SS guards was arrested Friday on terrorism charges, Italian police said.

The man has been charged with terrorist association and incitement to commit racist and anti-Semitic attacks, also through the spread of propaganda, a statement said.

"Along with others, he created a Nazi group called 'New Social Order' that aimed to recruit other volunteers and to plan extreme and violent actions," police said.

In online chats with like-minded peers, the suspect talked about replicating past far-right terrorist attacks in Norway and New Zealand, and expressed deeply misogynist feelings, police said.

He also helped draft and post on the internet anti-Semitic documents that called for "violent rebellion" against "the state occupied by Jews" and for "the physical elimination of Jews," police said.

He was apprehended in the northwestern port city of Savona, but officers also searched the homes of 12 other suspects elsewhere in Italy, including Turin in the north and Sicily's capital Palermo.

Italy's fringe, sometimes violent, far-right groups have roots in the country's Fascist dictatorship from 1922 to 1943 under Benito Mussolini.

In 2018, a neo-Nazi sympathiser fired on a dozen African migrants in the central town of Macerata, injuring six.

The attack was an apparent response to the killing of a young Italian woman blamed on a Nigerian drug dealer.

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