When Dracula is not a movie but a news story. One thing is certain: on the afternoon of a very cold 1st February 1963 a young man was arrested for a case of vampirism.
Venice was covered with a white blanket of snow. Attracted by the female screams of a woman, the few passers-by saw in “Calle dell’Aseo” in Cannaregio a man lying on the ground above her who was holding her arms. The passers-by thought it was a quarrel between boyfriends and no one hinted to intervene. The man was biting furiously on the woman’s neck, sucking her blood and licking her wounds while the woman was screaming, trying to fight unfortunately without success.
An off-duty policeman realized the situation and intervened immediately. He immobilized the young man and grabbed him by the hair thus freeing the unfortunate woman who, with a bloody face and in terror, took refuge in a tavern.
The madman managed to get away and escape, trying again not far away to assault another woman, who was walking, always attaching her neck and trying to bite her.
At this point, however, even the indifferent passers-by realized that something was really wrong: when the policeman came running to get the woman out of the young man’s grip, they intervened and finally immobilized the man, although after a desperate resistance.
Once blocked, the young man fell into a kind of trance. He calmed down, did not react and began to utter a woman’s name: Maria. The man was taken to the police station where they identified him as a thirty-one-year old man from an island in the lagoon. Then they transferred him to the hospital in the psychiatric ward, where the doctors established that he was “sane”, although “in a state of confusion”.
At the trial against the young man, a dark story of erotic delirium caused by his girlfriend’s abandonment emerged. The chronicles told that the young man, a not yet successful artist, had never recovered after the crisis with his girlfriend, named Maria. The young artist was indicted for attempted murder.
Here ends the story of a vampire in Venice who, after serving a brief sentence, returned to his native island and never again gave signs of wanting to bite young women met by chance along a “calle”.
