The 21-month-old boy disappeared from his distant home in the Italian mountain range of the Apennines in the Italian region of Tuscany.
The boy was last seen in his room on Monday night, and was reported missing by his parents on Tuesday. Shortly afterwards, local police launched a large-scale search operation, and 1,000 people – including the police, fire brigade and alpine rescue service – took part in the search.
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Heard sounds
However, it was a journalist – who was to cover the search operation for RAI, Italy’s public national broadcaster – who found the boy over 1.5 kilometers from his home.
The journalist is said to have heard noises from the bottom of a ravine and called the police.
The police initially doubted that the sounds came from the boy because the area is known to be full of animals with sounds that “can sound like a child”. But after lowering a police officer 25 meters into the ravine, the boy was found, writes BBC.
– I expected an animal to come out. Instead, the boy came out, with his head high in the tall grass, and said, “Mommy.” It was a beautiful feeling, said police chief Danilo Ciccarelli at a press conference according to the channel.
The boy was taken to hospital for a health check, but apparently had only minor injuries. The police’s main hypothesis is that the boy woke up in the middle of the night and walked out of the house.
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Heard «mom»
Giuseppe Di Tommaso, the journalist who found the boy, said he was walking up to the missing boy’s home when he heard crying noises.
– I started shouting [navnet hans], to understand if it could be the child. I heard “mom,” the journalist said Sky News.
– I repeated the word “mom”, because children at that age repeat words.
Di Tommaso is then said to have seen the child about 10 meters away, in an area with dense and thorny bushes in the ravine.
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– Very active
However, the police do not believe that the two-year-old should have spent the night where he was found, because the bushes and grass had not been trampled down, writes Sky News. It is therefore probable that he had come to the place via the forest, and not the road.
– He is a very active child, very lively, said mayor Gian Piero Philip Moschetti at a press conference.
– He could walk a kilometer an hour. We have no idea how far he could have gone. He is used to going out of the house and being outdoors, the mayor said.
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