Pierre Berbiziers side enjoyed a dream start, scoring three tries in the opening six minutes to take an astonishing 21-0 lead at Murrayfield.

All three tries, from Mauro Bergamasco, Andrea Scanavacca and Kaine Robertson, were as a result of errors in Scotlands midfield and gave Italy a glimpse of history  their first victory away from home in the Six Nations.

Although Scotland controlled much of the rest of the match, they were only able to cross the tryline twice, through Rob Dewey and Chris Paterson.

The effort from Scotlands skipper gave the home crowd genuine hope but a couple of penalties from Scanavacca and a late try from Alessandro Troncon sealed the famous 17-37 success for Italy.

Bortolami indicated the desperation in the Italian ranks to chalk up their first triumph outside of Rome when he revealed his concern that Scotland may mount a dramatic comeback.

The Gloucester lock said: It was a very tough match but not the toughest of my life. I think that we had a very good start but the most important thing was to manage this situation well in the last 60 minutes.

We managed to keep the ball in the forwards for some time and this helped us to keep our lead.

After such a good start we had a little bit of fear over losing the game in the end because everything was perfect in the first few minutes.

There were 74 minutes still to go and it is a long time so it was very difficult to keep the pressure on Scotland.

We managed to defend well and play cleverly for the rest of the game which gave us this win.

Every single time we scored I was impressing upon my team that we needed to keep the pressure on Scotlands shoulders.

We still wanted to play our rugby but still defend well and we showed on Saturday that when we had the ball in their half that we could score points.