Bologna, July 13, 2026 – First two shots, in quick succession. Then, after a few moments, a third noise. “Loud, like a nearby thunder, like something falling,” a neighbor would say. And then, only silence. This is how Roberto Rizzioli and Gianna Galletti, known to everyone simply as ‘Mrs. Gianna’, left us. He was eighty-one, she was eighty-six. A life always spent together, almost symbiotically in that beautiful apartment on the fourth floor of a building on via Shakespeare.
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Saturday morning, a couple’s life lived quietly and always with a smile ended tragically and quickly. The time it took for Roberto to fire three gunshots, with the weapon legally owned, a revolver. Two against his wife, who was in bed. He kept the other for himself.
The alarm raised by neighbors who found the bodies
The alarm went off Saturday morning around 6:30. It was the neighbors, who shared the landing with the elderly couple, who found the lifeless bodies and alerted emergency services and the police. It seemed as if Roberto had thought of everything, planned everything: the apartment door was ajar, a farewell note was in plain sight, with last wishes and references to the will. It was found by the patrol officers who intervened in the building where police activity continued throughout the day. In the apartment, now sealed off, the medical examiner and forensic team took turns, collecting evidence that, moment by moment, made the dynamics of a domestic tragedy clearer. Initial investigations by the police suggest that what drove the man to the extreme act was his wife’s health condition, who was suffering from a serious illness. A ‘merciful’ murder, as it was once called.
Those who know the couple don’t believe it: “They decided to leave together”
But those who know the couple think differently: “They decided to leave together, after a life spent together.” But no one will really be able to determine that, perhaps not even the investigations. No one can say if Mrs. Gianna was aware and had consented to end it this way. If she was consenting to that definitive decision carried out, Saturday morning, with clear determination, by her husband. The woman was perhaps still asleep. And she went from sleep to death. Roberto moved to another room and pointed the weapon at himself to finish the job.
All neighbors were interviewed
All the neighbors were interviewed. First, the couple in their fifties who found the bodies. They cared for those polite elderly people and so, awakened by the noises, they looked out and found the apartment door open: they went to check that everything was in order, that the two spouses, who had no children, were fine. Instead, they faced a terrible scene, one they will hardly ever forget. The call to emergency services was useless: both were already dead when the paramedics arrived.
“They were a very kind couple”
“They were very kind,” say two neighbors who live in the building next to the victims’ and share the same courtyard. He, a former worker, had continued to keep busy after retirement: “He was a volunteer ecological guard – they explain –. He cared a lot that everything was in order, checked that we threw waste in the right place and that the dogs were ‘well-behaved’. He was a very cordial person.” And so was Mrs. Gianna: “We didn’t know she was ill – the neighbors add –, apart from the usual ailments that come with age: she had broken a femur some time ago, but now we saw that, little by little, she had started walking again. We are shocked by what happened, we could never have imagined such an outcome.”
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