It was the best weather for a trip to Whitsun in all of Italy, from the Brenner to Sicily.

It was like hearing a collective sigh of relief: the dark veil of the pandemic was torn away, all twenty regions of the country had just been declared a “yellow zone” by the government, with low risk of infection and few restrictions.

Matthias Rüb

Political correspondent for Italy, the Vatican, Albania and Malta based in Rome.

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    But Pentecost Sunday 2021 will not be remembered in Italy as the prelude to a summer “beyond the virus”, but as the day of the tragedy of Stresa on Lake Maggiore. From there, that spot of the Belpaese particularly blessed by the beauty of nature, the still disparate news of the course and cause of the disaster came from investigators and eyewitnesses on Sunday and the following day.

    The uphill cabin was occupied by 15 people, including two boys aged five and six and a two-year-old toddler, and was barely a hundred meters from the mountain station of the Stresa-Mottarone cable car. For an unexplained cause, shortly before 1 p.m., the suspension rope broke with a loud bang. The cabin raced down the valley. With another deafening noise, the cabin hit the last concrete pillar of the cable car, which it had passed shortly before, after barely a hundred meters. The cabin then fell about 15 meters, hit the ground on steep terrain in the aisle under the cable car, overturned several times and finally remained in the dense tree population that lines the about 20-meter-wide aisle. According to one helper's estimate,who was involved in rescuing the victims, from the moment the rope broke until the cabin hit the pillar and the ground, eight to ten seconds at most passed.

    The five and six year old boys were still breathing

    The emergency services found the remains of eight victims in the difficult-to-access forest, some of them 40 meters from the destroyed cabin.

    Five other fatalities were recovered from the rubble, including the two-year-old toddler.

    The two five- and six-year-old boys in the ruins of the cabin were still breathing. With life-threatening injuries, they were flown to the Regina Margherita hospital in Turin.

    Six-year-old Mattia P. died in the clinic on Sunday evening.

    The only survivor of the disaster on Monday was five-year-old Eitan Moshe B. He had fractures in both legs and other broken bones, and doctors were able to stabilize his condition after an emergency operation. Eitan's parents came to Italy from Israel in 2018. Eitan's father Amit B., 30 years old, had completed his medical degree in Pavia. He and his 27-year-old wife Tal did not survive the accident. Neither does her little son Tom B., the youngest victim of the disaster at the age of two. Eitan's grandparents, 83 and 71 years old, also died in the accident. They had come to Italy from Israel on a spring visit.

    In addition to the Israeli family, almost completely wiped out during an excursion to Lake Maggiore, one of the foreign victims is a 27-year-old Iranian who had lived in Calabria for several years. Contrary to initial reports on Sunday afternoon, there were no Germans in the cable car. The other victims were two couples in their late twenties and one in their late forties from Lombardy and Calabria and a family of three from Emilia-Romagna, including the six-year-old boy.