It was when he had wrestled for around a minute with the growling brown bear on top of him that Daniele Maturi, a heavy-set Italian cable car worker, thought his number was up. "I was exhausted," he says, sitting on a hospital bed, deep scratches on his wrist. "I thought: if this goes on another 20 seconds, I'm finished. My life ends here."  Eventually, after an attack which left Maturi with deep bites on his arm and knee, an injury to his back and "40 or 50 stitches", the bear retreated into the woods. Maturi, 38, who had been foraging for mushrooms near his home in Pinzolo, says he does not know why Daniza, an 18-year-old mother bear with two eight-month-old cubs, let him go. The important thing is that he escaped – battered and bruised but in one piece.  What Maturi could not have imagined is that his tale has, in the week since the attack last Friday, fuelled a row that has spread far beyond the borders of this Alpine province in northern Italy. Perhaps even more surprisingly, he has not even been the saga's protagonist: that award, indisputably, goes to Daniza.  Her fate has divided Italians, with a large web-led campaign by activists and animal rights sympathisers begging the Trentino authorities not to carry out their aim of capturing – and, in extreme circumstances, killing – the bear.  The campaign, so far, has had no success. The autonomous province of Trento is sticking to its policy, insisting it is the only possible response to protect public safety. It is backed by Italy's environment ministry, which said "Daniza the bear must be put in such a condition as to no longer be able to assault people". She will only be killed, however, if she presents "immediate danger" during the capture.  There is, however, a hitch: Daniza, it seems, is not for capturing. For seven days, she has been on the run. In the Italian media, she has become one of the most notorious fugitives of the summer.  "They looked for a mafioso like this too," chuckles Caterina Rosa Marino, of the League for the Abolition of Hunting (LAC), standing beside a protest stall in the city of Trento. Set up by animal rights groups, it is fronted by a flame – which, they say, will be extinguished when and if Daniza is caught. "We do not think she should be captured or killed because she has not shown anomalous behaviour. She simply defended her cubs, which is what any mother would do," Marino says. "The behaviour of the mushroom forager was not suitable."  This is a charge Maturi rejects. He says he was on the route he often takes and was stunned to suddenly see Daniza, with her two cubs, sleeping about six metres away. "I couldn't understand how I had managed to get so near to them without them realising it. Probably because they were sleeping they didn't hear me," he says. "It was a maybe a second from the time I saw them to when the bear woke up."  What happened then, he says, is a blur, but he remembers that the bear started to growl and pushed him with her paw on his back. "I fell to the ground," he says. "And she jumped on top of me." Defending himself against claims that he may have behaved in a way that provoked Daniza, he insists: " I did nothing wrong."  This was the first known real – not merely threatened – attack on a person since Daniza and nine other brown bears were reintroduced into northern Italy from Slovenia between 1999 and 2001. One of Europe's most successful reintroduction schemes, the Life Ursus project, co-funded by the EU, has taken the local population of brown bears from three or four to around 50.  As the numbers have grown, however, so has local opposition, vigorously voiced on the political stage by the rightwing Northern League. In 2011 its Trentino branch held a dinner to express anger with the project. Bear was on the menu as well the agenda.  "I can understand that someone living in London, or Milan, or Rome, or Naples, might think 'how lovely the bears are'. Well, we'll bring the bears there, if they like. And we'll see if they like it," says Maurizio Fugatti, a local councillor and general secretary of the League in Trentino. For years, as attacks on livestock increase and locals grown increasingly disgruntled, he and his party have been calling for an end to Life Ursus. Some proponents of the scheme now fear that what happened to Maturi has put wind in their sails.  "From a local perspective this incident is bad because there are a lot of people, political groups, who say 'we don't like the bears' and now they have the opportunity to say we have shown that the bear can attack," says Osvaldo Negra, a local representative of WWF Italy. "But from the beginning the people who know bears [have said that] they are potentially dangerous. Of course. Like the lynx, like the wolf. But also a truck is a potentially dangerous structure. Also the highway. We have to pay attention. If we like to live in a complex environment with animals bigger than a squirrel, we have to pay attention."  The province, as well as the government in Rome, says the Daniza case is a one-off and the Life Ursus will not be affected. For the moment it has a more urgent priority to attend to: capturing Daniza. Although she wears a radio collar which enables them to locate her at all times, the difficulty lies in enticing her into one of three large tube traps they have lain. So far, the meat and fish have done no good. But Claudio Groff from the province's forest and fauna office remains undeterred. "The bear is moving as bears do. Even with cubs they move around a lot. These traps are positioned across a very big area. We know we have put them in places she often goes, but 'often' can mean once a fortnight or once a month and so we know that the chances of getting her are good but it could take … several weeks."
Animal rights groups beg officials not to capture fugitive bear after attack that left cable car worker needing 50 stitches