A dive into the icy waters of Lavarone and a sudden illness. Fear for photographer Massimo Sestini who is now hospitalized in the intensive care unit at the Santa Chiara hospital in Trento. Sestini, an internationally renowned photographer, was taking part in a diving meeting: he dived, but due to a sudden illness he never returned to the surface and also lost consciousness. The group of divers noticed the anomaly and one of them immediately raised the alarm.
The Lavarone firefighters and the Red Cross of the Altipiani Cimbri intervened to rescue him. Pulled out of the lake in cardiac arrest, Sestini was immediately resuscitated on site by rescuers and then transported by helicopter to the hospital in Trento. He will now undergo maneuvers to free his lungs from the water. He is currently hospitalized in intensive care in a pharmacological coma.
Born in Prato in 1963, Massimo Sestini is one of the most prominent photographers on the Italian scene. The shot that made him famous worldwide dates back to 1991, when he photographed Diana in a bathing suit in Sardinia.
His first scoops date back to 1984: he managed to photograph Licio Gelli in Geneva while he was being escorted to prison and on 23 December 1984 he was the only photographer to enter the carriage of the Rapido 904 destroyed by a bomb in the San Benedetto Val di Sambro Gallery . Sestini photographed, among others, Charles of England in Recanati while he was painting a watercolour, the tragedy of the Moby Prince and even what remained after the attacks on Falcone and Borsellino . One of his most famous shots was the one of the Costa Concordia: in 2012 he dived with the Navy divers inside the ship that had just sunk.
Sestini was also awarded the World Press Photo Award for the photo, taken from above, of a dinghy loaded with 227 migrants off the coast of Libya. Feared by celebrities, he has often found himself with scoops and photos that were never published before. Like that time with Diana Spencer, on the tragic night of August 31, 1997. He said that his agency had photographed Princess Diana:
