18 people die in 10 days picking mushrooms

Eighteen people have died while mushroom picking in Italy in little more than a week. The victims have died after falling into rocky crevasses and gorges or from similar physical mishaps, rather than from inadvertently eating poisonous fungi.

Authorities said an early and bountiful mushroom harvest in the Alpine valleys of northern Italy had attracted more people than usual to scour the woods and forests in search of succulent funghi to bring to the dinner table. Many of them were unfit and ill-equipped, venturing into remote areas without proper footwear or rainproof clothing, and without checking weather forecasts.

Collecting wild mushrooms as autumn approaches is an extremely popular pastime in Italy. Seven of the deaths happened in the Lombardy region while others occurred in Piedmont, on the border with France, and Trentino-Alto Adige, adjacent to Austria.

“Lots of people go to areas which are easy to access, but there are always a few people who want to search out remote bits of woodland which no one else knows”, Marco Biasoni, a mountain rescuer from Bolzano, in the north of the country, said. In the most recent case, a 65 year old woman died after falling 40 metres down a steep rocky slope in a forest near the town of Sondrio, in a mountainous region close to the Swiss border.