Twenty-eight-year-old Darco Sangermano was hit in his head by the stray .22 calibre bullet while wandering with his girlfriend through the city of Naples notorious for its rowdy New Year celebrations.

The bullet went through the right side of his head, behind his eye socket and lodged in his nasal passage but miraculously did no serious damage.

Bleeding heavily, he was taken to hospital in an ambulance shortly after midnight, but while waiting to be seen by doctors he sneezed and the bullet shot out of his right nostril.

Sangermano, a craftsman from Turin, returned to his hometown after being released from hospital. “The route of the bullet broke his temporal bone, near his temple, and this slowed down the bullet which grazed his eyeball without hitting it directly,” Dr Guglielmo Ramieri of the hospital said.