A five-meter flight from a disused building, where he often did parkour, a French discipline that involves overcoming any kind of obstacle in acrobatics.
The 17-year-old rescued last night in Canelli, in the Asti area, is hospitalized in very serious conditions, after having fallen from a balcony without a balustrade of the 'Canei' cellar in via Buenos Aires, subject to bankruptcy ordinance and now closed by about ten years.
With him some friends, all minors, who apparently were used to bouncing off roofs, walls and stairs as required by this extreme urban discipline.
Last night's intrusion into the abandoned building, according to some residents of the area, was not the first.
And even some local boys, famous for their sparkling wines and historic wineries, let it slip that "nothing had ever happened before".
Yet the mayor, Paolo Lanzavecchia, maintains that "the Municipality does not have any activities of that kind among young people".
"Reports have not arrived. The boys did not enter from the public street, but from the rear, the railway area", explains the mayor, revealing that "he had talked to his father and guaranteed him all the proximity of the municipal administration".
Who, moreover, had long ago made a request to reclaim and refurbish the area of the former winery, but it was "only a problem of urban decor and environmental recovery. We never had reason to think - concludes the mayor Lanzavecchia - to a security problem ".
The investigations of the carabinieri will have to ascertain whether the boys really practiced parkour in the meanders of the former cellar, a discipline that started from France has already made several victims in Italy.
A 20-year-old boy was found dead last year on the roof of a train car on the Valsugana Trento-Primolano line.
In 2019, two other young people died or were seriously injured for the same reason: a 19-year-old rapper died while doing acrobatic jumps in a parking lot in Frosinone.
The boy had fallen after a fifteen-meter flight, crashing to the ground.
In Comense, three teenagers from Brianza had decided to take a parkour course on the roofs of an industrial area.
One of them, a 16-year-old, fell from a height of five meters and was transported unconscious to the hospital.
Born in France in the 1980s, parkour was invented by David Belle, who began practicing in Lisse, a suburb of Paris, the techniques he learned as a child in the woods of the French countryside.
Taking his cue from the "fighter's path", that is the war path used in military training, he replaced the c with the k to suggest aggression and eliminated the silent s because it was in contrast with the idea of efficiency.
Parkour practitioners are called "traceurs".
Since then, what is considered a sport, despite exposing it to high risks, has attracted followers all over the world.
Often, however, as in the case of accidents in Italy, it is practiced without any safety rules.