LUCCA. Five years and 10 months after the accident which occurred in the area of the gunboat of the San Regolo bastion with two French tourists residing in Dubai who fell from the Walls – a 5 year old boy who suffered injuries judged to be healable in 40 days and his father who, to the rescue of his son who fell down with his bicycle, he threw himself to save him, suffering a series of fractures – the first hearing of an affair which at the time inflamed the city and sparked a hornet’s nest of controversy took place before Justice of the Peace Armando Breschi. The then majority did not have the courage to reaffirm a sacrosanct principle – despite several civil sentences on the matter which always found private individuals wrong, as in the last case dated October 2023 when the civil section of the Court of Appeal of Florence found wrong a German tourist who in 2014 fell from a height of 10 meters in the area of the S. Croce bastion who claimed to obtain compensation of 290 thousand euros from the Opera delle Mura – preferring to settle the security issue applied to the Walls by installing some objectionable metal nets that the Superintendent Acordon in an interview with The Tyrrhenian Sea he called it “obscene”.
Damn time
A trial, the one in front of the justice of the peace, which risks ending with nothing. Because the legal institution of prescription looms over the matter. That is to say the extinction of the crime following the passage of a certain period of time. Which in the case of the crime charged to the three defendants – simple negligent injuries which the code punishes with a fine of 600 euros – ceases by the end of 2025. But beyond the possible criminal conviction, a guilty verdict would be used in civil court for compensation. Now, considering that the trial which began yesterday morning has been postponed to November 20th to hear other witnesses (six are those cited by the honorary prosecutor Francesco Carlesi and a couple of them will be heard because the hearing will not last more than three hours) and that having exhausted the witnesses of the prosecution there will be hearings of those of the defense, speeches, indictments, and possible replies, managing to complete the trial in the first level of judgment will already be a titanic undertaking. If we add to this elementary consideration the more than certain hypothesis of a possible appeal, we understand the futility of a criminal proceeding when the path that could be taken – difficult to say with what outcome given the precedents – would have been that of a request for compensation of the damage in civil proceedings.
Inconsistencies
If at the moment a compensation request from the injured party has not been quantified, during the hearing of the engineer Pierre Alexis Magnin, the father of the child who fell and was also injured in the attempt to rescue his son, and his wife Caroline Assier – a series of inconsistencies. The child’s father claims that he had no reason to believe that the Walls were so high. “When we climbed above the slope it was gentle like a slope.” Beyond the presence of danger signs scattered along the route, the group of tourists, before the accident, had passed through the San Giorgio prison, in front of Porta S. Anna and in the area of the Caffé delle Mura and San Colombano. It is therefore impossible not to notice the height exceeding 10 meters in certain sections. Another inconsistency is the presence of another child on a bike together with Pierre and Caroline Magnin’s son, as his mother claimed in the courtroom in French: “My child’s bike wasn’t the only bike that rode along the parapet.” In the police report there is no trace of another child and the renter, an employee of Cicli Bizzarri, claims to have provided the bicycle to that man only for that boy that day.
