  Sgr A*, the compact radio source, believed to be the counterpart of the
massive black hole at the galactic nucleus, was observed to undergo rapid and
intense flaring activity in X-rays with Chandra in October 2000. We report here
the detection with XMM-Newton EPIC cameras of the early phase of a similar
X-ray flare from this source, which occurred on September 4, 2001. The source
2-10 keV luminosity increased by a factor about 20 to reach a level of 4
10^{34} erg s^{-1} in a time interval of about 900 s, just before the end of
the observation. The data indicate that the source spectrum was hard during the
flare. This XMM-Newton observation confirms the results obtained by Chandra and
suggests that, in Sgr A*, rapid and intense X-ray flaring is not a rare event.
This can constrain the emission mechanism models proposed for this source, and
also implies that the crucial multiwavelength observation programs planned to
explore the behaviour of the radio/sub-mm and hard X-ray/gamma-ray emissions
during the X-ray flares, have a good chance of success.
