Giulia, 21, perished in Love Parade crush at Duisburg. MySpace message: “Too rare to die”
MILAN – The Italian woman who died in the Love Parade disaster at Duisburg in Germany has been named. She was Giulia Minola, 21, from Brescia. Ms Minola was studying fashion and design at Milan Polytechnic and was touring Europe with a girlfriend. The two left last Friday on what was to be a week’s holiday. Ms Minola lived with her family in a small residential block in Brescia, where from early on Sunday morning relatives and friends were appearing to offer her parents their condolences. The friend, who is a fellow student from Turin, suffered minor injuries in the disaster. The two women had become separated in the crowd and Irina, the luckier of the two, found out about Giulia’s tragic death when she went to the first aid station for treatment.
“TOO WEIRD TO LIVE” – Giulia had a profile on MySpace, where she used the nickname Purple Haze, probably inspired by the well-known Jimi Hendrix song which begins with a quotation from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: “Too weird to live, too rare to die”. She is also flagged on the site as a “free spirit” with a “crazy personality”. Photos uploaded by Giulia often show her with friends, including some taken at the first of May concert in Piazza San Giovanni in Rome. Giulia was a keen social networker. On Facebook, she had inserted Milan Polytechnic as her network and her photo showed her dancing. Someone with access to her account later substituted this with another photo in which she is smiling into the camera. The profile reflects a young woman with a wide range of tastes in music, from Daft Punk to Mia Martini, Gogol Bordello, Alberto Camerini and the Chemical Brothers, who also loved cinema. Among her favourite films are Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, Fight and A Clockwork Orange.
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