No autopsy on the body of Raffaele Gulmanelli, the 36-year-old from Imola who disappeared on Friday during a dive in the waters of Giglio island while on holiday with his sister and friends. This is what the Prosecutor’s Office decided after the diagnostic test ordered yesterday. In reconstructing the tragedy, the family spoke of “illness and that his sister Matilde Clelia in particular, and his friend Silvano Brizzi, who were with him in those days, were the people who first tried to help him”.
While waiting, therefore, to know the date of the funeral (the Imolese Funeral Agency of Santandrea and Scardovi will take care of it), his family and closest friends have decided to keep his memory alive and honor him by taking to the sea that took his life, to discover the charm, the most disadvantaged people with whom Raffaele was involved as a social worker at the department of mental health and pathological addictions of the Imola Local Health Authority. The project is called “Vela d’amare”, because that’s what Raffaele – who had been working on it for some time – wanted it to be called, combining his passion for the sea with the experience of freedom on a sailing boat.
The reconstruction of the family
Together with Raffaele, in Giglio Campese, in the family house where he often went, there were also his sister Matilde Clelia and his friend Silvano Brizzi. Alarmed by the fact that he did not return from the freediving trip, after notifying the Port Authority they went to look for him by boat. And they found him in the Capel Rosso body of water. They hoisted his body on board and tried to resuscitate him by practicing mouth-to-mouth resuscitation while waiting for help to arrive. During their return they then encountered the Coast Guard patrol boat which escorted them to the port. On the platform the intervention of the medics who for over an hour tried in every way to resuscitate him, but in the end they had to give up. Raffaele, loved and appreciated by his colleagues at the local health authority who underlined “his professionalism and his kind and sociable character, which also made him popular with patients”, was an expert diver and instructor for the Imolamare association. A passion that he shared with his father Giampaolo, also an expert freediver and founder, at the end of the 1960s, of the Imola Sub association. He knew those waters very well, but despite his preparation and familiarity with the places, they were fatal to him. The father himself wanted to remember how when you go into the sea the danger is always present and lurking. And how the fate that befell him should be a warning to pay the utmost attention, so that what happened to his son does not happen to others.
