Alberto Trentini and Mario Burlò returned to Italy after more than a year of detention in Venezuela. The two Italian citizens arrived this Tuesday morning at Ciampino Airport with a state flight departed from Caracas and landed in the CAI area, reserved for the movements of aircraft of security services. To welcome them were the President of the Council Giorgia Meloni, Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani and some family and legal: the mother of Trentini, Armanda Colusso, the lawyer Alessandra Ballerini, the daughter of Burlò and his lawyer Maurizio Basile.
After arrival, Trentini quickly left the airport without making any statements. To talk to journalists was his lawyer, who asked respect for the family’s will to live this stage away from public attention. “We are very happy today, but our happiness has a very high price,” he said, recalling the 423 days of detention and the physical and psychological consequences of an experience that he called “interminable”. Ballerini thanked the people and organizations who supported the campaign for the liberation of Trentini, without answering questions.
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Burlò, however, stopped to speak briefly with the chroniclers. He said he had not suffered physical violence and never received a formal charge during detention. He reconstructed the moment of arrest, explaining that the Venezuelan authorities would identify him as a political opponent after finding his intervention online at the Chamber of Deputies dating back to the period when he was president of the National Union. “They said I was a politician and I wanted to blow up the government,” he said. He added he wanted to go home as soon as possible to be with the family.
According to his lawyer Maurizio Basile, Burlò, who is 52 years old, is “very tried” by the detention. In previous days, a story published by the Press reported that for more than a year he would be forced to sleep on the ground. The President of the Council left the airport before 9, without meeting journalists, and shortly after he released on social media a video of the arrival of the two Italians in Ciampino.
The cases of Trentini and Burlò had different public attention. Trentini, a co-operator of the internationalong Humanity & Inclusion, working with people with disabilities in crisis contexts, had become the face of a wide and transversal mobilization for its liberation. Burlò, an entrepreneur from Turin, was little known by public opinion, also because in Italy he is investigated for various fiscal and financial crimes. Both had been arrested in November 2024 and, according to diplomatic reconstructions, their detention was part of the pressure strategy of the Venezuelan government on Italy, a practice called “deplomacy of the hostages”.
Their scarceness was decided by the government led by Delcy Rodríguez. The negotiations involved several international actors, including the Italian government, the United States, the Vatican and Venezuelan political representatives. After the release, Meloni thanked Rodríguez “for the constructive collaboration demonstrated”.
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