Feature: Italy ascertains one victim killed in Paris attacks, witnesses return home

An Italian girl lost her life in the Paris terror attacks which killed 129 people and injured more than 350 on Friday night, Italian authorities confirmed at the weekend.

The foreign ministry announced that Valeria Solesin, a 28-year-old graduate student from Venice, had died. "She was a wonderful person, citizen and student," her mother, Luciana Milani, told journalists.

Solesin had been living in Paris for the past four years, where she was doing research in demography. On Friday night, she was at the Bataclan concert hall, where the biggest attack took place, together with her Italian boyfriend and friends. They lost sight of her during the shootings.

In a letter addressed to her parents, President Sergio Mattarella stressed that Italy would "respond with intransigence to this lethal challenge of oppression and death."

Another two Italians were injured at the concert hall. One survivor, Massimiliano Natalucci, told Rai State television: "I kept watching the terrorists. I crawled towards the exit when they did not look at me and pretended to be dead when they looked towards me."

The 45-year-old man said he witnessed "horrific scenes" with "dozens of corpses on the ground and scattered throughout the hall."

"I saw with my own eyes the terrorists shooting at injured people who were moving and gasping on the ground," he said. His friend and fellow Italian Laura Appolloni successfully underwent surgery but was in deep shock, according to Italian diplomatic authorities in Paris.

Other Italian citizens who were in Paris when the attacks occurred had been eating in a restaurant and received calls from their families. "They phoned us from Italy to ask where we were," said a tourist from southern Italy. "We left the restaurant and saw a lot of people on the phone outside, so realized that something serious had happened," she said.

A class of some 20 students of a high school in Bergamo, a city in northern Italy, only just avoided the massacre as they were eating in another restaurant not far from one of the places where the attacks occurred. "We went down to the subway and a desperate French girl got on the train screaming," their professor, Annalisa Cagnoli Cassader, told local newspaper L'Eco di Bergamo.

"She was covered with blood spots of the people hit by the attackers. This young girl was not injured, but she was crying and I saw she had the horror in her eyes," the professor said.

Italian-born Emanuela Perruci, who lives in Paris with her husband and three children told Xinhua: "On Friday night, we were at home watching a movie with our children. Suddenly the movie was interrupted by the breaking news."

Perrucci said she stayed awake almost the whole night trying to explain to her kids what was going on, striving to appear calm and determined.

Perrucci noted that French citizens had reacted with courage and pride, filling squares and avenues with families and children. "I am not French, perhaps I am not even very brave and do not know how you get used to the attacks, but certainly I cannot keep children away from schools, gymnasiums and parks," she said.

Her children's school is now patrolled, while a psychologist has worked all weekend to make the return to school as calm as possible.

With regards to whether or not Perrucci will return to Italy as a result of the events, she told Xinhua: "I have not taken a decision yet. I will follow the evolution of events. Should there not be the conditions to live peacefully, I believe that I will be forced to return to central Italy, in Pistoia." Endit