Not quite "La Dolce Vita"

Even a short time in Italy makes it easy to understand why many talk of the sweet life in that country.  But, as this BBC article details, some Italian prisoners do not see life as very sweet:

Hundreds of prisoners serving life sentences in Italy have called on President Giorgio Napolitano to bring back the death penalty.  Their request was published as a letter in the daily newspaper La Repubblica. Italy has almost 1,300 prisoners serving life terms, of whom 200 have served more than 20 years.

Italy has been at the forefront of the fight against capital punishment and recently lobbied the UN Security Council to table a moratorium on it. But at home some of the country's longest serving prisoners want the death penalty re-introduced.

The letter they sent to President Napolitano came from a convicted mobster, Carmelo Musumeci, a 52-year-old who has been in prison for 17 years.  It was co-signed by 310 of his fellow lifers. Musumeci said he was tired of dying a little bit every day.  We want to die just once, he said, and "we are asking for our life sentence to be changed to a death sentence".