Giulia’s boyfriend, who died in the avalanche: “We had to get married and go and live in Venice: everything collapsed”
FELTRE – «We were supposed to get married, the idea was to go and stay in Venice where Giulia has a house, with her boat moored there in front and with those sunsets that remain in your eyes, instead it all ended, in an instant, under a couple of meters of snow»: Jeremy Bassani, 36 years old from Feltremanager of a French multinational company based in Milan, is the boyfriend of Julia Ramellithe 34-year-old Venetian ski instructor who on Wednesday afternoon was engaged in an excursion with seal skins in the Cinque Torri area, above Cortina.
THE UNDERSTANDING
The first time he had seen Giulia was a year ago, on the ski slopes of Cortina, he had asked mutual friends who he was, she had done the same by inquiring about him. They had met, he had been struck by the determination of that woman with an ever-ready smile, by her contagious dynamism that she released from her, by the desire to do things, especially those that gave her adrenaline.
“Sometimes even too much – Jeremy recalls – not that I was worried, I know he was prudent and that he knew the mountains well, but you always have that vague feeling that something can happen to those you love in the mountains”.
THE SENSATION
A sort of sixth sense of Jeremy’s that had also come into play on Wednesday around 2 pm. I would never hear his voice again.” The agreement was to be in Cortina that same evening, but fate had other plans. The first alarm bell a few hours later: «Usually when he reached the summit or began the return, he sent me a message “all right”, “now I’m going down”, things like that, but that afternoon I didn’t get anything». Even without those two words, often accompanied by emoticons of hearts and kisses, Jeremy didn’t want to think of the worst, “he simply must have been in a hurry, maybe they were late, I didn’t worry too much”. The first doubts in the late afternoon: «Some friends called me asking me if it was me in the Cinque Torri because the rumor had spread that an avalanche had descended there and that there was one serious wound and one slightly injured». Then it’s as if darkness had fallen, the life you had imagined dissolves, the future freezes: “Just as I was on the phone with a friend, I received a call from Giulia’s mother and there I understood”. When the ski instructor is pulled from the snow, her conditions are serious: cardiopulmonary resuscitation maneuvers are performed on her, then they load her onto Falco who heads to Ca’ Foncello in Treviso. Giulia struggles all night, but at dawn on Thursday her heart stops forever. «She At first she was injured, seriously, but still alive, I thought she would have gotten away with … instead». Now Jeremy is left with the memories of a few intense months spent with a special person: he will squeeze them like lemons to get that smile back close, to hear that voice. “The most beautiful thing we’ve done together is the flight over Lake Iseo, I have a pilot’s license for light aircraft: we were happy up there and we had promised ourselves to fly over the Dolomites too starting from Belluno, it won’t happen”. But the moments engraved forever in Jeremy’s mind are those of last May in Venice: he had given her a tour by plane, she had reciprocated by taking him to the lagoon aboard her boat: «An entire day at sea, we ate fish and in the evening going towards the setting sun we gave each other our first kiss».
THE GOODBYE
The day of the funeral has yet to be established: the Public Prosecutor’s Office has not yet authorized the funeral, the position of the 50-year-old Piero Paccagnella who was with Giula at the time of the tragedy remains to be clarified: he was in front of the 34-year-old and it was he who launched the distress call . It is not excluded that with his weight she caused the detachment which then hit her. Years ago Paccagnella had been involved in another tragedy and survived: on the Sella his climbing partner had flown 40 meters and died. Also a few weeks ago in the Dolomites, during a ski mountaineering trip, his partner had cut his head and Paccagnella had always activated the rescue services.