Great Torino | The tragedy covered in mystery!

September 18, 2024

May 4, 1949 cursed | “Great Turin”

Who was the one who decided to change the arrival route from Milan to Turin? Maybe Valentino Mazzola himself, who scared the Lombard city of a possible denunciation of bigamy after he had divorced his wife?

Or maybe they were all settling down, and maybe they were afraid of an “ambush from the financial police”?! The players had made a profitable bargain in Portugal and may have preferred to avoid customs, remembering the “hit” they had received from the military police some time before, from the return of the transfer from Trieste, when the finance had blocked their bus to seize american cigarettes and biles had banned and kept even

Gabetto ……..

Or was it simply a decision taken just to hasten the return home by suggesting the pilot to change the previous route and head directly

for Turin?

All these questions and conjectures have remained unanswered.

The only clear thing from that cursed May 4, 1949 remains:

the deep regret of the president Ferruccio Novo, sick at home, who for a long time and starting from the team’s position in the classification that ensured winning the title, had programmed the friendly transfer; then the fate of the player Sauro Toma’, the only one from the formation blocked by an injury, remained at home; and finally the regret of the Portuguese captain Ferreyra, where a few weeks before on February 27, playing against Italy in Genoa, he had asked his friend Valentino Mazzola to send the Torino team to Lisbon on the occasion of Ferreyra’s departure – s from football and where afterwards all the contribution made by the spectators provided the latter with a comfortable pension.

Bad luck, set his other factors in motion to carry out the bull, in the midst of the mist and the pouring rain, at 17:00 on May 4, the silhouette of the basilica of Supergas appears in front of the pilot G. 212, a few meters away, in a vision of light, and then everything comes to an end!!

The big crash, the airplane that is destroyed in pieces, leaving only the tail, the burnt bodies that had filled the place around, and then the disbelief of this mass that takes and flows over the city and from there to the whole of Italy like a river that has come out of their bed. dark and muddy. 18 players were killed in the plane: Bacigalupo, Aldo and Dino Ballarin, Bongiorni, Castigliano, Fadini, Gabetto, Grava, Grezar, Loik, Maroso, Martelli, Mazzola, Menti II, Operto, Ossola, Rigamonti, Schubert, general director Agnisetta, the advisor Civalleri, the technical manager of the team Erbstein and the trainer Lievesley with the masseuse Cortina, then also the journalists of “Tutto Sport” Casalbore, Cavallero of “La Stampa”, Tosatti of “La Gazzetta del Popolo” and the list ends with the responsible organizer Bonaiuti and four members of the airplane crew.

He met the national trainer Vittorio Pozzo to go and identify the bodies of “his sons”. He recognized them all one by one with tears in his eyes as if he was making the appeal of the national team, (he knew them very well at the time when he made the gathering because most of Turin also represented the Azzurri national team), thus the best part of Italian football was lost with “a drop of the pencil”.

By: Pjerin Bj
May 2024