Davide Rebellin, Matteo Salvini takes action

Matteo Salvini’s words

Matteo Salvini, the new Minister of Infrastructure and Transport, wrote an open letter to Gazzetta dello Sport after the death of Davide Rebellin.

“This tragic death imposes for the umpteenth time the issue of road safety. For 41 days I have had the honor of leading a Ministry as important and complex as the MIT, and among the various dossiers is one dedicated to the Highway Code and efforts to avert accidents. The issue is serious and does not deserve to be trivialized, so I will be extremely concrete: the Istat data offer a worrying picture. The record number of accidents in absolute terms is in Rome and then Milan, but between 2020 and 2021 the increase in fatalities was 11.1 percent with some cities deserving special attention: fatalities rose 133 percent in Messina, 85.7 percent in Florence, and 54.5 percent in Catania. Tremendous are the numbers for scooters: between 2020 and 2021, the increase in claims marks +272.52%. Clearly, measures are needed to nurture that “culture of safety” recalled in yesterday’s Gazzetta dello Sport by Urbano Cairo and which cyclists’ associations called for in their letter to the Head of State. As Mit, in addition to evaluating a possible reform of the highway code on which technicians are reasoning (the goal is to protect the users most at risk, just like cyclists), an awareness campaign has already started on social media that will be intensified over the Christmas period. It is an initiative that I inherited: we will do more,” Salvini wrote.