Swastikas on the wall become giant cupcakes with purple icing, and the words "my Hitler" are transformed into "my muffins." All in a day's work for the Italian street artist who fights racism by turning nasty graffiti into food.

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"I take care of my city by replacing symbols of hate with delicious things to eat," says the 39-year-old artist, whose real name is Pier Paolo Spinazze and whose professional name, Cibo, is the Italian word for food.

On a recent sunny morning, he had been alerted by one of his 363,000 Instagram followers that there were swastikas and racial slurs in a small tunnel on the outskirts of Verona.

Up he turned, wearing his signature straw hat and necklace of stuffed sausages. He took out his bag of spray paints and set to work, while cars drove by beeping.

He covered up the slurs with a bright slice of Margherita pizza and a Caprese salad – mozzarella, tomatoes, and basil. A swastika was transformed into a huge red tomato. As he created the murals in the tunnel, which each took around 15 minutes, people drove by, peering out of their windows to stare and wave. One art teacher wound down her window to compliment his work.

In recent years, human rights groups have warned of growing racism in Italy following mass immigration from Africa. Fascist culture and wartime dictator Benito Mussolini still have a hard core of admirers.

As he has become a local celebrity in Verona, he has also made enemies: "Cibo sleep with the lights on!" someone spray-painted on a wall. He turned the threat into the ingredients of a gnocchi recipe.

"Dealing with extremists is never good because they are violent people, they are used to violence, but they are also cowards and very stupid," Spinazze said.

"The important thing is to rediscover values that we may have forgotten, especially anti-fascism and the fight against totalitarian regimes that stem from the Second World War," he said. "We must remind ourselves of these values."

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In addition to the swastika, pictures of Shira Banki, who was murdered by an ultra-Orthodox man while attending the 2015 Jerusalem Pride Parade were also strewn about at the entrance to the synagogue.

In a statement, Prime Minister Naftali Bennett called the vandalism a "grave act of hatred and incitement."

He said: "Such contempt for the holy of holies in Israel, including the criminal use of the picture of the young woman who was murdered, Shira Banki, is a contemptible and evil act. We will not remain silent. The police will hold the perpetrators accountable and we will settle the score with them. Ahead of the [Hebrew] month of Elul [in which Jews repent in spiritual preparation for the High Holidays], the Jewish people must come together and show blind love to one another."

Public Security Minister Omer Bar-Lev condemned the incident on Twitter, saying: "The vandals who vandalized the synagogue in Bnei Brak with swastikas and further dared to defile the image of Shira Banki, a girl who was full of light, beauty, and love of the other, we will get our hands on you and you will pay the price. For shame!"

Worshippers at the synagogue were in a state of shock, representatives for Rabbi Asher Landau, who heads the synagogue, said in a statement.

Noting many worshippers at Young Israel are Holocaust survivors, they said the synagogue had raised the banner of unity and rapprochement and its worshippers included congregants from many different ethnic backgrounds and circles of life.

"Rabbi Landau calls on everyone to respect and love one another and to honor the sanctity of the Torah and the land, and he added he expects this shocking and unfortunate incident to be condemned by all rabbis and leaders in a dialogue that contributes to unity and not, heaven forbid, sectarianism.

United Torah Judaism MK Yakov Asher said the "unruly hooliganism and spray painting of swastikas at the synagogue in Bnei Brak on Shabbat are the rotten fruits of ongoing and unrestrained incitement against anything that smells like Judaism, and Haredim are dripping in it. I hope I succeed in advancing the amendment to the anti-racism law so that inciters are punished and effective deterrence is created."

Yaakov Vider, chairman of the Bnei Brak Municipality's Likud faction, said: "We take the incident very seriously! Spray painting swastikas on a Zionist synagogue in the city is reminiscent of very dark days in the Jewish people's history."

Vider said he expected the Israel Police to quickly handle the incident so that those responsible for the incident are quickly caught and face the full severity of the law."

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