A violent supercell struck the Lombardy city of Cremona just after 4 p.m. Tuesday, delivering wind gusts of nearly 110 km/h and hailstones the size of oranges. Forty-one people were injured — two of them seriously, a 63-year-old and an 84-year-old in their cars when trees fell on them. A spire on the Duomo and the roof of the town hall’s civica tower were torn off.
The outbreak — what Italian meteorologists call a ‘supercella’ — had been building over the western Apennines since early Monday, fed by a cold front pushed down from the Alps. It moved east through the Brianza area in the early hours of Tuesday, delivered a round of large hail on Milan’s northern suburbs, and intensified as it hit Cremona in the late afternoon when the thermal instability was at its peak.
In Piazza Roma and Piazza Marconi (both in the historic center, near the Museo del Violino), trunks and boughs of mature plane trees fell across the squares and onto parked cars. Hundreds of shop windows were cracked or shattered. The fire service — over 200 crews — worked through the night to clear debris and stabilize the structures around the cathedral and the Palazzo Comunale.
The Duomo’s spire — one of the twin pinnacles that frames the entrance — was torn off, along with a section of the nave’s roof. The roof of the Torre Civica, the only surviving fragment of the 1206 city hall, was blown away. The city hall’s own windows were damaged.
In the Pavia and Cremona areas, the storm left a trail of downed trees in Soresina, Crema, and Casalmaggiore. In the Mantua area, a state road (SS10 ‘Padana inferiore’) was closed in both directions due to flash flooding and downed trees. Three hundred and fifty hikers in the Trentino were stranded overnight when winds of 110 km/h closed the cable cars and forced rescue crews to evacuate them from mountain paths.
In Piazza Roma, near the Museo del Violino, the trunks of mature plane trees had collapsed across the square — the city that built the violins of Stradivari flattened in less than ten minutes.