"I'm too old for all that Internet malarkey (nonsense)," chuckles the 73-year-old, his cockney accent jarring with his Mediterranean complexion.

Old or not, Cavalli has kept a sharp eye on the inroads which the information superhighway has made into his North London birthplace of Clerkenwell.

A whole raft of e-commerce companies, Internet consultancies and design agencies have crammed into the neighbourhood's narrow streets and alleyways, transforming an area once known as `Little Italy' into a high-tech haven.

Down the road from St Peter's Italian Church, where Cavalli works as secretary of the parish club, a plethora of restaurants, bars and night clubs have sprung up to service the intense young computer gurus who scooter by.

Open-plan offices replete with baggy-trousered programmers occupy the spaces from which ice-cream vendors and pizza chefs used to ply their wares.

But the dotcom invasion has not ousted Clerkenwell's Italian community, whose numbers had dwindled to a few hundred from a pre-World War-II height of 10,000.

"They made money and most moved out into the suburbs about 10 years ago," said Cavalli, who now lives South of the Thames.

Indeed, the arrival of the high-tech industry two years ago has reversed Clerkenwell's reputation as a grotty, run-down quarter.

And the so-called `digerati's' caffeine addiction has ensured that the aroma of espresso still wafts around the neighbourhood, pumped out by a host of coffee bars.

Lying to the West of the city's financial towers and to the east of the show houses of the West End, Clerkenwell was the perfect location for Moreover.com, an Internet content provider.

"This place is great. When we went out to San Francisco we went to the place that most represented Clerkenwell," Nick Denton, Moreover's chief executive officer, told Reuters.

"It is as cool as London gets," said the journalist turned entrepreneur.Like his colleagues in the "new-business" industry, Denton was attracted to Clerkenwell by its cheap rents, spacious lofts and central location.

Moreover.com is expanding rapidly but the company is being selective about finding a new premises.

"The staff refuse to move out of Clerkenwell. We would have a strike on our hands if we tried," said Denton.

If they did take to the streets they would be following aproud tradition.During the 19th century, Clerkenwell was known as "the headquarters of republicanism, revolution and ultra non-conformity".

Giuseppe Mazzini, an Italian revolutionary credited with being the brains behind his country's unification, fled to the neighbourhood in 1837 and stayed for 10 years, establishing a school during his stay.

Not all the militants were Mediterranean.

Some 60 years after Mazzini passed through, Sun Yat-Sen, known as the Father of the Republic of China, set up shop in nearby Gray's Inn, where in between popping out for a pint of milk he derived his formula for government.

And Lenin himself had a 12-month stint in Clerkenwell.

The exiled Russian revolutionary would surely be shocked todiscover that a mere stone's throw away from where he used to edit the Bolshevik mouthpiece, Iskra, the streets are buzzing with venture capitalists.