Feature: Italy mourns four victims in Tunisia's museum attack

Shock and sorrow permeated Italy on Thursday as the toll of Italian victims after Wednesday's deadly attack at the national museum of Bardo in Tunisia rose to four.

The Italian authorities condemned the bloody act which killed more than 20 tourists visiting for the day and seriously injured around 50 at the Tunis museum.

Prime Minister Matteo Renzi expressed his condolences to the families of the victims and the Tunisian authorities for the country's worst assault targeting foreigners since 2002.

"Some completely innocent Italians have been killed while they were there on holiday, maybe a holiday awaited for long time," Foreign Minister Paolo Gentiloni said in an interview with Rai State television.

"It is extremely painful for us as well as for other nations hit by the attack," he added.

"Italy must raise the level of security and surveillance without scaremongering or panicking but with awareness that there is a menace which has hit Paris, Belgium and yesterday Tunisia," Gentiloni also added.

The Italian press dedicated large space to the distressing stories told by survivors. When the attack occurred, in the museum there were around 80 tourists from Turin, a city in northern Italy, on a cruise.

"They are shooting, help us," a clerk at the municipality of Turin, Carolina Bottari, told a journalist in Rome as she managed to make a phone call during the attack, Turin-based La Stampa newspaper reported.

Turin authorities said later that the woman has undergone a surgery at a Tunis hospital. She was not in life peril, but her husband, Orazio Conte, a computer technician, was among the victims.

The couple had joined a low cost trip organized by the municipality's employees. "She had persuaded Orazio to participate, they loved each other very much, she always spoke about him," Bottari's colleagues told La Stampa.

"We were all crying, but gestured to be silent," an elderly man, Alberto Di Porto, who was also visiting the museum with his wife, told Corriere della Sera newspaper. The 71-year-old man said the shooting lasted for at least 20 minutes.

"We were lying down and holding hands ... I did not know what to think, if you ask me what my feeling was I cannot explain. I was only hoping to survive," Di Porto said shortly before being informed that his life was alive too.

Italian company Costa Cruises, whose Fascinosa ship was hosting the group of Turin tourists and docked in Tunis at the time of the attack, said in a statement on Thursday that it has stopped all visits to Tunisia after the attack.

Italian President Sergio Mattarella told U.S. network CNN in an interview that there is "not much time" to face the threat of terrorism.

He defined the Tunisia attack as "alarming" and stressed the urgency of supporting the United Nations in their efforts to reconcile Libyan forces for the fight against extremists. Endit