At last, Italy has been put out of one of its worst cases of collective lottery agony. After not showing for almost two years, number 53 was pulled out of the basket in the Venice lottery on Wednesday night.

All over Italy people had placed increasingly huge bets on the elusive number in recent months, more and more convinced that it had to appear.

In a frenzy that even lottery-mad Italy has rarely seen, some 53 addicts ran up debts, went bankrupt, and lost their homes to the bailiffs.

Four died in 53-related incidents. A woman drowned herself in the sea off Tuscany leaving a note admitting that she had spent her family's savings on the number. A man from Signa near Florence shot his wife and son before killing himself. A man was arrested in Sicily this week for beating his wife out of frustration at debts incurred by his 53 habit.

In all, more than €3.5bn (£2.4bn) was spent on 53, an average of €227 for each family. In January alone, €671.9m was spent.

Although 53 had come up in other regional lotteries, it had not appeared in Venice since May 2003, and Wednesday was the 153th draw. The government will pay out around €600m in winnings to an unspecified number of winners.

This was not, however, the longest losing streak in the history of the Italian lotteries, which began in Genoa in the 16th century.

In 1941 the number 8 kept people waiting for 201 draws in Rome, raising the suspicion that Mussolini was somehow spiriting the number away each fortnight to keep the bets coming in to help finance Italy's entry into the second world war.