It’s the night between Friday 23 and Saturday 24 April 1999it’s almost three o’clock: it’s pitch dark in Salerno on the pier of the Masuccio Salernitano tourist port. Maurizio Morena and Stella Vignes, two engaged couples in their early twenties, beautiful as the sun, are embracing in the car. It’s late, we have to go home to avoid the reproaches of our parents. Maurizio starts the Fiat Tipo and sets off, but too quickly. The short ride ends first against an electrical control unit placed at the edge of the pier and then on the almost invisible bollard, the iron structure for mooring boats. The car jolts, almost overturns and, now uncontrollable, falls headlong into the sea, pushed rapidly towards the bottom by the weight of the engine.
In the collision the boy, 25 years old, hits his head on the windshield and dies instantly. For Stella, 22 years old, these are the last seconds of life nightmarish. The pressure blocks the doors, the electrically opening windows don’t work: the water has short-circuited the fuses. The young woman looks for an escape route, dying clinging with her hands to a small crack in a rear window. She was found in that position less than an hour later by fire brigade divers.
A guardian, Mario Bracciante, after hearing the loud noise, abandons the container where he was resting and witnesses the last seconds of the tragedy, without being able to intervene. She screams for help, attracts the attention of some sailors and runs to the telephone to warn the police. But it’s all useless, the two boyfriends are already dead. Maurizio Morena lived with his parents in via Salvatore Calenda and on the cursed weekend he wanted to celebrate with his girlfriend, whom he had recently met, his first significant economic success since he had obtained a job as a commercial agent. Stella, however, still had to overcome a few obstacles before earning her long-hoped-for degree Business Economics. Hers was a brilliant existence, spent non-stop between commitments in the social field and a political experience in the last municipal elections: she ran as a candidate on the People’s Party lists, achieving moderate success.
The tragic end of the two engaged couples greatly affected the Salerno community who gathered in prayer at their funerals. Stella’s father, the lawyer Antonio Vignes, owner of an auto parts sales center in the city center, survived the greatest pain until 2022 when he left earthly existence. A year earlier, in 2021, the girl’s mother had a poster put up in memory of her daughter and her boyfriend in which she wrote «… when we are sad, when we can’t get by, we will look up into the sky and find you again, STELLA , in the most beautiful, brightest star that will shine wonderfully in the firmament and will watch forever in our hearts”.
