Massa Lubrense, the grandfather of little Gennaro: "I feared a tragedy"

An ambulance arrived to provide care to Franco Porzio, the grandfather of Gennaro Rotoli, the three-year-old boy who disappeared and was found after four hours of searching in Massa Lubrense.

To console grandfather Franco, struck by a slight illness dictated by the tension accumulated after the discovery of the child - ironically - it was Gennaro himself who thought of getting into the ambulance to give him comfort.

“They were terrible hours,” Grandpa Franco explained later, “when my daughter called me, my first thought was that Gennaro might have fallen into the valley that leads to the river and I rushed over. But I also thought about the possibility of a kidnapping. Luckily, the video surveillance cameras had filmed him and then we understood that he had gone away on his own. From there, the search began. It was terrible, luckily everything went well.”

“Gennaro didn’t say anything when I hugged him again, but his eyes said it all.” Father Carmine still has to process what he calls “a great fear, I didn’t think it was true, that it was happening to me” when he spoke to journalists a few minutes after little Gennaro was found.

He is the one who reconstructs what happened: “I was at work this morning, my wife was preparing milk for the other little brother who is five months old, it was a quarter to 10, when Gennaro took advantage of the door being ajar and left the house and opened a gate that was closed, then took the path that we usually take in the car when I take him to school.

He is a very smart child, he recognizes places. No, I never thought he had been kidnapped, it is not the area. And I did not think about the Angela Celentano affair. This is a quiet place. However, I feared the worst, that something had happened to him. He did not even have shoes on, only pajamas and socks. Maybe he wanted to go to kindergarten.

We alerted the police, who I thank because they mobilized immediately, even with helicopters. It was a bad experience. Gennaro turned the Sorrento Peninsula upside down in ten minutes. Luckily - he concludes with a sigh of relief - it went well and when I saw him again I was reborn”.