The victims of bad weather in Italy are rising

Heavy rains and gusts of wind in Italy in recent days have killed at least 17 people and have literally swept through vast areas of forest, especially in the north.

The last two victims were a German tourist struck by lightning in Sardinia and an Italian hospitalized for several days, also after a lightning strike, and having lost the battle to stay alive.

As announced by the Civil Protection Service, 17 deaths directly related to extreme weather events were reported. Many victims have been looted by trees.

Coldiretti, the confederation of Italian agricultural cooperatives, estimates that winds have destroyed about 14 million trees, most of them in northern Italy.

Several regions have been affected by storms, from northeastern Italy to southwestern Sicily. The most serious damage has been reported in the Trentino and Veneto regions, where roads have been destroyed and villages excluded from landslides.

In the Alps, near Belluno, 100 km north of Venice, the pines and firs were full.

The Swaziland dam at Commerical, further north, near the border with Austria, was covered with logs of fallen trees on the Piave river.

"We will need at least a century to get back to normal," Coldiretti noted.

Many squares and streets of Venice are still under water, at the worst flood that the city has known for more than a decade.

The governor of Venice, Luka Tsaia, said that disasters amounted to at least one billion euros.