A trip he had been planning for some time: starting by bike from Bastille, in the Modenese area, to reach Santiago de Compostela and take the path trodden every year by thousands of people. While he was designing it he had also had the shell tattooed, a symbol of pilgrims.

Now the young man, Adriano Pacifico , a 32-year-old cook with two daughters, has gone missing. And the mother Grazia, suspicious of some details, left for the south of France, the place from which her son left the last signs.

The last contact took place a week ago in the Toulon area , where Adriano had arrived after days of cycling. A video call between mother and son, but not from his cell phone because - at least so he said - it was broken and he had borrowed one from a person he met on the way. The young man said he had stopped for a few days because he was not very well physically, but he wanted to leave as soon as possible for Spain.

Since then, there has been a total blackout, and those signals that have fueled Mother Grazia's concern. A few days later the woman spoke with the boy who had lent his son the cell phone: "He left, he is traveling alone", he told him. She contacted him later but he changed his version, saying that Adriano was traveling with other people .

The woman was struck by another detail: “In one of these video calls I noticed that this person lived in a particular place, it looked like a shack. An abandoned and unkempt place . I got scared and I'm pretty scared even now, ”she told the local press.

Other meat on the fire, another source of concern: the various small withdrawals from the son's ATM made a short distance from each other , all operations from 20-30 euros.

So the woman immediately got in touch with the French police, but also started asking questions to those she met in the area, to find out if they had seen the boy on a bicycle. There were numerous appeals, disseminated via social networks also in the vast network of pilgrims who every year attend the Camino de Santiago. The search is complicated, but Grazia does not lose heart: “ I do what every mother would do ”.

The case is also followed up by the Farnesina : sources from the Foreign Ministry let it be known that Pacifico's family "is in contact with our consulate general in Marseille, which also has jurisdiction over Toulon and is providing all the necessary assistance".

(Unioneonline / L)

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