The Gazzetta del Mezzogiorno of 30/10/2015

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The Via Roma collapse will return to the courtroom on Nov. 25.

But it will not be for sentencing. The trial turns back from the final replication stage for which yesterday’s hearing had been scheduled. Which for all constituted the eve of the first-degree verdict.

For almost everyone. Because, surprisingly, the defense of architect Giovanni Paparella, in the Caesarini zone, aimed at collapsing what constitutes one of the pillars of the prosecution supported by prosecutor Giuseppe Maralfa and that is the expert opinion carried out during the preliminary investigation in the forms of the evidentiary incident, therefore even before the start of the trial of the 15 defendants.

It all hinges on an alleged contradiction by Professor Franco Bontempi, of Rome’s La Sapienza University, who together with colleague Roberto Gerundo, of the University of Salerno, before evidentiary accident gip Angela Schiralli concluded that the building on Via Roma, the adjacent area of Srl Giannini (where the work believed to be the cause of the collapse was being carried out) and the sling building on Via De Leon constituted a single body of the building.

Therefore, any structural work should have been designed with this in mind; especially since it would have taken very little for there to be a failure of the entire building body. But in yesterday’s hearing Paparella’s defense, entrusted to lawyer Andrea Di Comite, in the course of the so-called replies changed a the script, not limiting itself to replies but to real new requests and productions. The lawyer for the one whom the prosecutor believes to be the director of works in the Giannini area produced recordings of two conferences in which Bontempi himself, talking about the Barletta case, would have concluded differently from what was claimed in the expert report filed with the gip Angela Schiralli and later acquired at the trial.

On a first occasion in Milan and on a second occasion in South Africa, in Cape Town, Bontempi, for the defense, argued that it took a very strong action to cause the Via Roma building to collapse, thus different from the tenuousness that, according to the evidentiary incident, would have been sufficient in itself to create the conditions for structural failure.

So a contradiction, according to the defense, on which the tranese court panel (Giulia Pavese, Roberta Savelli, Paola Buccelli) also wants to see it through.

And so the judges ordered Prof. Bontempi to return to the courtroom on Nov. 25 to clarify what at least now appears to be a contradiction. Bontempi’s conference speeches, taken from Youtube, with accompanying translation of the English paper given in Cape Town, ended up in the trial record.

A defensive shockwave from which other defendants charged in the Oct. 3, 2011, tragedy, when factory workers Matilde Doronzo, Giovanna Sardaro, Antonella Zaza and Tina Cenci died under the rubble, as well as the employer’s daughter Maria Cinquepalmi, just 14 years old, who had left school earlier that day. Another 11 people were injured in a thicket of damage of varying nature and extent.