The Romans apparently did not consider wolves overly dangerous to people, with the only references to them attacking people being proverbial or mythological. Although Italy has no records of wolf attacks on humans after World War II and the eradication of rabies in the 1960s, historians examining church and administrative records from northern Italy's central Po Valley region (which includes a part of modern-day Switzerland) found 440 cases of wolves attacking people between the 15th and 19th centuries. The 19th-century records show that from 1801 to 1825, 112 attacks occurred, 77 of which resulted in death. Of these cases, only five were attributed to rabid animals.
