One Sunday afternoon, just two days before Brussels' terrorist attacks, I was walking by the Central Station and was stopped by two teachers (the two ladies you can see in the picture below). They started talking to me in English but I immediately recognized their accent (clearly from Veneto ;)) and we switched to Italian. They explained that they had just landed with their students and were planning to visit Napoleon's museum in Waterloo on Tuesday (22/3) in the early morning. They asked me about the most practical way to get there. They were very inclined to take the metro, but I strongly discouraged them to do so because the metro would have been too crowded at that time and it would have been extremely unpractical to have dozen of students taking it. Moreover, I told them that I knew very well how to get to Waterloo, since I had been working for many years just a few km far from it (and actually going to lunch every single day in Waterloo, what a coincidence for them to bump into me!!!) and that the fastest way would have been to take the train from the Central Station (they told me that their hotel was walking distance from there) to the South Station, then a bus going directly to the town.
However, the first reason (that I didn't mention to the two teachers, probably not to scare them) that came to my mind when they mentioned the metro option was safety! My first thought was actually ... the fear of a terrorist attack! My mind went rapidly to Paris attacks which only occurred a few months before and I felt a sense of insecurity in considering to take the metro (even though Paris attacks did not involve any metro ... funny, eh?). Premonition? The more I think about it, the more I think that yes... it was indeed some kind of premonition. Unfortunately, the two ladies decided that it was more important to let their students try the metro rather than following my detailed suggestions and this choice almost got them killed (they took the same metro line just 10' before the attacks). This is a fact. But how did I figured out about the whole story?
Well, the night of the attacks, my mother called me and told me about the interview to an Italian survivor (from Veneto) who was on the metro that was bombed. While looking for that interview online, I actually bumped into a video showing the arrival of the students from Cologna Veneta school and I immediately recognized the teachers...
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