“Mom, mom, answer me.” It was her twelve-year-old son who was the first to try to help Francesca Ianni, the 45-year-old woman hit by the collapse of a tree while she was sitting on a bench in the Roman park Livio Labor in Colli Aniene. A few meters away were his little brothers, aged 7 and 10. Flaminia’s friend, Alessia A., also a teacher like the victim, was also seriously injured. Alessia, like Flaminia, a teacher in Brussels, had also returned home to Rome for the Christmas holidays, leaving King’s College in London, where she has taught since 2007. She is struggling to survive. The tragedy that struck a mother of three children is not an accident. It is sloppiness, carelessness, the result of an abysmal indifference towards the safety and decorum of a common good. Although it was said that the tree had recently undergone an inspection, it was evidently not enough. Francesca Ianni should not have died, yet her life broke before the eyes of her children, while a poplar tree, uprooted by a wind that was too strong for a root that was too rotten, collapsed on top of her.
The tears of the Colli Aniene neighborhood are full of indignation, of an anger that points the finger at those who should have been vigilant and did not. “Shame on you!”, the citizens shout, and it is an accusation that weighs like a conviction. The Livio Labor park, for years defined as “the hole”, is a symbol of abandonment: the unsafe bridge, the dangerous trees, the greenery left at the mercy of itself. “Do we always need tragedies to intervene?” asks Gabriella Masella of the neighborhood committee. It is easy now to listen to words of condolence, like those of Mayor Gualtieri. But the city’s pain is not enough to cover the feeling of an administration that only moves after the drama has taken place. The money for the bridge is there, it is said. But where is the concrete action? Where are the controls that could have prevented the roar of a tree falling on a mother, killing her? Sloppiness produces death, it is intolerable. You don’t need to be an expert to know that trees with rotten roots are very dangerous and require continuous care and urgent interventions. Taking refuge behind fatality is an alibi that is too convenient and comfortable.
The Prosecutor’s Office is investigating for manslaughter. But it’s not enough. Rome must look in the mirror and ask itself why a similar tragedy, heralded by years of degradation, was allowed to happen.
