A sad story from Italy appeared today, the first day of 2008, in La Repubblica. A guy was celebrating the New Year with his family on the 9th floor of an apartment block in Torre Annunziata, just south of Naples, when a stray bullet came through the window at 11:15pm on Capodanno (New Year’s Eve). He was actually inside the apartment, sitting at the dining table, when he just collapsed on the table stone dead, struck by a celebratory bullet that some testa di cazzo (dickhead) had fired off in the street below. According to the report, gunshot and firework injuries are all too common at New Year’s Eve, but the numbers are staggering: yesterday there were 473 wounded by fireworks and gunshots, some seriously, including a young child of 10 shot in the head and a woman of 41 shot in the torso, both of whom are in critical condition. And that astonishing number is actually a reduction on the previous year, when there were 526 casualties, and that was nearly half of the casualties in 2000 and 2001:
…ai Capodanni del 2000 e del 2001 quando si registrarono, rispettivamente, 3 morti e 952 feriti e 4 morti e oltre mille feriti. Negli anni successivi, fino al San Silvestro del 2006, non ci furono più vittime: 544 feriti nel 2002, 568 nel 2003, 584 nel 2004 e 550 nel 2005″
And we thought Hogmanay street parties had their fair share of casualties, but places like Edinburgh aren’t in the same league as Italy, which surely is a dangerous place to be on Capodanno. You’re not even safe indoors… 
Proiettili vaganti, un morto. La Repubblica online, 1/1/08
