Eight days of hopes vanish at 4.15 pm on 23 September. Mattia Luconi the 8-year-old boy lost in the flood of 15 September was found by the police of Ancona in an agricultural field of Trecastelli, several kilometers away. To notice the body of the child, who was wearing only a shirt, was a girl from the area, who reported the discovery to the owner of the camp. The man immediately raised the alarm to the rescuers who had been concentrated in the Contrada Coste area for two days. The firefighters and carabinieri arrived in a few minutes. On a bright sunny day, Mattia’s body emerged from tens of centimeters of mud.
“In part I hoped that they would not find him, now the hopes are over”, said the father of the little one, Tiziano Luconi, immediately after the discovery of the little body. “I feel like a crystal statue being beaten and shattered. The pain annihilates me.”
Mom yesterday Silvia Always she was discharged from the hospital where she was admitted for pneumonia. And she had said to her family: “I’m not going home without Mattia”. Both yesterday and today the woman followed the search operations like the father of the little one who every day traveled kilometers with binoculars in search of her son. It may seem surreal but now that mum and dad were together on the research sites, Mattia has returned to them.
The child’s body will be transferred to the Ancona hospital where the autopsy and DNA sampling will be performed, which will put the seal on its recognition. The body of little Mattia was noticed around 3.30 pm in a field at Passo Ripe di Trecastelli, about 13 km away from Farneto, the town of Castelleone di Susa where on the evening of September 15 he abandoned his car, dragged from the flood, together with her mother Silvia Mereu. Mom and son went out the window. The two were then separated by the violence of the water: the mother was found cold and injured a couple of kilometers away in a tree.
Mourning in Barbara and San Lorenzo in Campo, the two villages where Mattia’s parents live. Davide Dellonti, first citizen of San Lorenzo in Campo has followed the family at every step and is at the place where they were found: “I am saddened like our whole community, we have hoped for the impossible. Today is the worst day for all of us” .
Thus the flood victims rise to 12. The 56-year-old is still missing Brunella Chiu.