An alleged unforgotten wrong over land expropriated from her family and a 60-year-old grudge. A 92-year-old pensioner, above suspicion, has been identified by police as responsible for three vandalisms of the tomb of former Treviglio mayor Ermanno Riganti, who led the city from 1965 to 1975 and passed away in 2007. The investigation by the local police station in the town in the lower Bergamo area began after the former mayor's tombstone was vandalized on August 14th: the photograph was damaged, and an insulting slogan denounced the deceased buried there appeared next to it.
These incidents then recurred twice more in the following months, shaking the city, given that Riganti is remembered as a mayor beloved by all political factions and without any enemies whatsoever. Reviewing footage from the cemetery's security cameras and interviewing several people, officers from the Treviglio police station—also in collaboration with the local police— surprisedly identified the ninety-two-year-old, who lives in the city and regularly walked to the cemetery. It emerged that the pensioner had harbored a grudge against the former mayor for 60 years, ever since the municipality, under Riganti, expropriated her family's land in the northern part of the city to build a public housing complex. This was an event the woman's family had never accepted, always blaming the then mayor.
Last summer, while passing by the cemetery, the ninety-two-year-old noticed that some work was underway on Ermanno Riganti's grave, on the eve of the twentieth anniversary of his death on July 3, 2007, at the age of 84. This event reportedly prompted her to take action, damaging his gravestone. Under pressure, she admitted her responsibility to the police and chose a conciliation solution: on the one hand, the Riganti family opted to withdraw the complaint they had filed—against unknown persons at the time—after the damage, while the pensioner paid compensation for the damages, amounting to less than €400 in total. It remains to be seen whether the Bergamo prosecutor's office will consider the matter to be prosecutable, but given the woman's age, this case too is likely to be dismissed.
