Thank you, mum: Final call home as fire crept in
TRAPPED and facing death in their flat on the 23rd floor, Gloria Trevisan and Marco Gottardi made heart-rending final phone calls to their families in Italy.
In their last moments, the couple said goodbye to their parents, with Miss Trevisan telling her mother: ‘Thank you for what you have done for me.’
Her fiance tried to play down fears but the couple eventually admitted smoke was rising around them and they could see flames coming up the stairs.
The couple, both architecture graduates, moved to London three months ago to look for work and were captivated by the views over the capital from their flat.
Miss Trevisan, 27, who had completed her master’s degree in architecture at Venice University last year, posted numerous photographs of the capital’s skyline on photograph- sharing site Instagram.
One showed a rainbow stretched across the city, with the caption: ‘Spettacolo [spectacular].’
As the fire spread on Wednesday, Mr Gottardi, 27, called his family at 3.45am and again just after 4am.
His father Giannino told Italian newspaper Il Mattino di Padova: ‘In the first call Marco told us not to worry, that everything was under control, that basically we must not worry. He was trying to minimise what happened, probably not to unsettle us.
‘But in the second call – and I can’t get this out of my head – he said there was smoke, that so much smoke was rising.
‘We were on the phone until the last moment … At 4.07am he told us their apartment was flooded with smoke and that the situation had become an emergency.
‘The communications broke down and from that moment on we no longer had any contact. The phone didn’t pick up again.’
Miss Trevisan called her parents at 3am, telling them that a fire had broken out and they were waiting for help.
Her father Loris said: ‘ They wanted to go down but said they could see flames going up the stairs and the smoke was more and more intense.’
Seconds later the line cut out and Mr Trevisan said he had made hundreds of attempts to contact his daughter since.
The family’s lawyer Maria Cristina Sandrin said: ‘I’ve heard the recording of Gloria talking to her mother and there is no hope to find them alive. She said goodbye. She said, “Thank you mother for what you have done for me.”’
The lawyer said the families wanted to bring the couple’s remains home to Italy, but added: ‘We don’t know in what condition we will find the bodies, if we will find the bodies.’