Grottaminarda is preparing for another evening of live music with the arrival of the Matsumoto Zoku Band at Castello d'Aquino on Wednesday 19 June the Matsumoto Zoku Band have conquered audiences with their original and engaging music creating a wave of psychedelic and funky groove The band consists of brothers Reo Matsumoto (handpan beatbox and percussion) and Koji Matsumoto (handpan and didgeridoo) who were joined in 2022 by new members Kenta Hayashi (guitar) and Nory (bass) Matsumoto Zoku Band offers a unique and vibrant musical experience Matsumoto Zoku Band have performed in 14 countries around the world taking to the stages of prestigious festivals such as the Ozora Festival in Hungary where they played six times on the Dragon Nest Stage A dreamlike evening starting from 10.00 pm at the Castello d'Aquino in Grottaminarda with a unique and engaging sound from the Matsumoto Zoku Band It will be visible after approval by the editorial staff To post a comment you must be an authenticated user. Log in with Social Login Project financed and implemented with funds from the Province of Avellino This website is using a security service to protect itself from online attacks The action you just performed triggered the security solution There are several actions that could trigger this block including submitting a certain word or phrase You can email the site owner to let them know you were blocked Please include what you were doing when this page came up and the Cloudflare Ray ID found at the bottom of this page WeBuild has launched the tunnel boring machine (TBM) Aurora for a 2km tunnel as part of the new Naples to Bari railway in Italy The TBM boring the Grottaminarda Tunnel has a 12m diameter cutter head and is 100m long making it the largest currently in operation in Italy It will excavate an average of 15m a day in the direction of Apice where it is expected to arrive in early 2024 The overall project will enable rail travel across the 260km between Naples on the west coast and Bari on the east coast in two hours using a combination of new and upgraded infrastructure including double tracking sections of single track This will modernise the existing train link between the Tyrrhenian and Adriatic mainlines a “highly tortuous route that lacks infrastructural homogeneity” according to project promoter Italferr The new works are divided into three sections The 2km Grottaminarda Tunnel is part of the 18.7km Apice-Hirpinia section which crosses the Apennines between the towns of Avellino and Benevento A consortium led by WeBuild was awarded the €608.1M (£525M) contract for this section in 2019 The Grottaminarda Tunnel will be the first of three tunnels on this section which will account for 12km of the route when complete The other tunnels to be bored are the 4.4km Melto tunnel and the 6.4km Rocchetta tunnel the Apice-Hirpinia section of the project will also feature the construction of a station at Hirpinia The Bari to Naples project is expected to complete in 2027 It is being funded under the Italian government’s €191.5bn (£165.3bn) National Recovery and Resilience Plan The new line is projected to carry 2.3M passengers annually and the expected benefits for the areas crossed by the project are significant This includes demographic growth of around 90,000 people 1.6% GDP growth and 3.6% increase in residents’ income It will also be a crucial freight route and constitutes part of the European Union’s Trans-European Transport Network (TEN-T) programme which aims to transfer 50% of road freight to rail by 2050 Watch a time-lapse video of the TBM Aurora being moved into place below Like what you've read? To receive New Civil Engineer's daily and weekly newsletters click here. Tagged with: A large structure apparently made of concrete and dozens of wind turbines… The anticipated cost of the Neom gigaproject in Northwest Saudi Arabia have… Advanced modular reactor (AMR) developer newcleo has initiated the process for to… Saudi Arabia’s giga-project Neom, the world’s largest civil engineering project which includes… Her parents have many unanswered questions about their daughter’s death in Campania four years ago The smiling photograph of a young British woman seems out of place, set in a tombstone in Grottaminarda’s cemetery. Here, in rural southern Italy is the final resting place of Claire Martin whose grave lies between those of Italian families whose descendants did not want to talk about her violent death On 1 March it will be four years since Martin struggled up the stairs outside her in-laws’ home clutching her bloody throat and gasping “a man” She died minutes later from 10 stab wounds to the throat prompting police to launch a murder investigation and a specialist team in Rome tried to piece together what had happened But 15 months later the case was closed as a suicide who are fighting to have the case reopened nearly everything points to Claire being killed Something underhand is happening,” says Pat Martin from the family’s Nottinghamshire home The reaction to Martin’s death stands in stark contrast to those of another British woman, Meredith Kercher, who was stabbed in Perugia little over four years earlier Her murder prompted the world’s media to descend on the picturesque city in central Italy sparking a high-profile case which reached Italy’s highest court and led to a series of books and at least one film More recently media attention was centred on the case of American Ashley Olsen, killed in her Florence apartment in January. The Martins do not understand why the violent death of another British woman has gone unnoticed. Pat Martin has read a book on the Kercher case to find out. “I earmarked lots of paragraphs in a Meredith Kercher book” “because there were so many similarities.” Martin’s death in the rural Campania region The investigation into her death was flawed from the start claiming that significant leads were sidelined and that the crime scene was fundamentally compromised within hours of Martin’s death Grottaminarda Photograph: Rosie ScammellWhen Pat and Ray Martin arrived in Grottaminarda on 2 March 2012 they were taken straight to the house where their daughter died “The only thing you would have known about that being the crime scene was that there was a bit of police tape attached to the front gate,” says Ray Martin had been staying with her in-laws up the hill from the town working part-time and looking after her one-year-old son while her partner The couple had met while working at a restaurant in Germany 12 years earlier and decided to settle in Mascolo’s hometown of Grottaminarda where they opened a pizzeria Their restaurant was forced to close within a year and they both had to find work in other restaurants Martin had been chatting to her father about plans to move to Frankfurt to join Mascolo who had been working there as a chef for three months “Her last words to me were: ‘Tell mum I love her and I’ll talk to her tomorrow’,” Ray Martin says by coroners Oto Macchione and Giuseppe Vacchiano concluded that Martin had been murdered and that her wounds were not compatible with suicide But neither did they find any signs of self-defence or injuries on her wrists – the latter disproving one person’s statement claiming to have seen cuts on one of Martin’s wrists Vacchiano remains certain Martin was murdered “It’s a problem that I carry inside … That I wasn’t able to make the judge understand how things really happened,” he says Days after the coroners filed their findings report in which he said it was probable Martin had stabbed herself – although she may have been murdered Macchione was not immediately available to comment on why he became doubtful of the cause of death though Vacchiano says his colleague’s change of opinion struck him as strange He said that when he went to see the judge about the investigation are we sure that it wasn’t a suicide?” Vacchiano found this odd: “I have never forgotten this phrase,” he says says she had set out looking at a murder investigation until evidence proved to her that Martin had killed herself “There weren’t all the marks [on her body] that there should have been .. if she had tried to defend herself in some way,” Palladino says Neither coroner had access to the 33cm kitchen knife found at the scene and had to rely on photographs of it during the autopsy In coroner Macchione’s second report he concluded Martin could have killed herself as the knife was so sharp it would have required minimum force to cause the wounds on her neck because [it was] pointed and sharp,” he found The authorities concluded Claire Martin had taken the knife from her flat in the centre of Grottaminarda Ray and Pat Martin had visited their daughter about two months before she died Ray is certain that the knife was not from Martin’s apartment His view is backed up by a wiretapped conversation in which someone who had worked often with Martin’s partner Vacchiano believes Martin was carrying a knife for self-defence when attacked “I think the woman lived in a condition [in which] she was scared of something or someone,” he says as signs that she tried to defend herself against an attacker who overpowered her the knife was sent to be analysed in Rome by the scientific police who were also involved in the Kercher case Investigators in the Italian capital found a component of male DNA on the handle of the knife but said it was “not useful” for future comparison The overall analysis concluded that Martin had committed suicide based on factors including the lack of space for an aggressor to operate in the small ground-floor area outside the house where she is believed to have sustained her injuries They also found that Martin would have had 10 to 15 minutes to find help after being injured had climbed the 21 steps to her in-laws’ home according to her mother-in-law’s testimony Martin said “a man” and gestured to signal her attacker had escaped towards the land above the house and died after the arrival of other family members and before an ambulance crew reached the house the forensic medicine and blood pattern expert who arrived on the scene 19 days later and so they were very probably test cuts.” Saliva says that he has frequently seen test cuts in suicide cases Saliva also says he relied on photographs taken at the scene and viewing the body to reach a conclusion of suicide as most of the blood had been cleaned up hours after the stabbing and Martin’s clothes had been destroyed director of the University of Strathclyde’s Centre for Forensic Science says that care is needed when relying on photographic evidence as fine spots of blood may not been seen and 2D images can be misleading if taken at an angle “You don’t tend to get many blood patterns from stabbings; what they’re looking at is drip patterns,” Fraser says giving the example of an attacker holding a weapon over their victim “It’s not clear to me how you could determine from a blood pattern how it could be a suicide.” Vacchiano finds it unusual that he was not informed in advance that Saliva would be joining the investigation it was as if they wanted to close the case quickly,” he says police supported the suicide theory with testimony from local people who said they had noticed Martin was missing her absent partner and had lost weight – by some accounts following a diet – and was worried about the move to Germany Those interviewed by the police had described Martin as a doting mother She was held in high regard by people in the town Claire Martin’s parents the chair of the perinatal faculty at the Royal College of Psychiatrists says women can be good at concealing symptoms of postnatal depression from their families “The striking thing about postnatal suicides is that they’re violent The person wants to make sure that they complete it they don’t want to take any chances about surviving,” she says Martin’s family are adamant that she was not suffering from postnatal depression and she was looking forward to life in Germany They claim the Italian investigators failed to follow – or ignored – leads to find Martin’s killer CCTV footage from a nearby hotel is said to show a man walking in the direction of the house a few minutes before Martin died Police asked local residents whether Martin had ties to men other than her partner – the general response was that Claire was committed to him a series of wiretaps were set up on local phone lines and rooms were bugged While the transcripts show people discussing suicide there are also questions that appear to support the murder theory People talked about someone hearing screams while another person named a suspect and threatened to “burn him alive” if he turned out to be Martin’s killer “That son of a bitch,” a man responds on being told how many cuts Martin sustained “Let’s hope that it’s him,” one person said on another occasion The transcripts are also filled with people telling each other to “shut up” and keep quiet discussions about the need to get lawyers and a person fearing they would end up in prison otherwise they will blame us,” someone says Judge Palladino says all leads were followed up and alibis checked Investigators also looked into Martin’s finances and found she had no life insurance policy and there had been no suspicious transactions from her bank accounts – although questions remain about the role of money in the case A handbag found under Martin’s body was taken by police who listed its contents without mentioning a significant amount of money two people were heard in a wiretap discussing Martin’s case and €700,000 in a bag when we finish we’ll go to the station in Grottaminarda and say that there was €700,000 inside the bag.” a person described police as being “fixated about the problem of the money” “it’s necessary for the wife to take the money” In discussing the wiretaps with the Observer Palladino said she did not recall the specific conversation referring to €700,000 She said investigators also examined the theory that Martin’s death could have been linked to the criminal underworld in the Campania region in a certain sense there could be infiltration but there was no specific element that we could look into.” Once Palladino ordered the case closed heard the Martins’ objection in 2014 and ruled there was no reason to reopen the investigation Pat and Ray Martin have since tried diplomatic channels, meeting the UK’s minister for Europe and asking him to press for the case to be reopened Italy’s undersecretary for European affairs says Gozi had not been involved in the case and has no authority in such an area The Foreign Office said in a statement that it “cannot interfere in the legal system of another country” although Ray Martin says the government has done so in the past which saw the direct intervention of David Cameron Nottinghamshire police are unable to intervene in the case unless invited by Italy although there are plans for an officer to travel with Pat and Ray Martin to meet Palmieri later this year At home the Martins have been supported by their Labour MP who joined the family in a meeting with Lidington and is asking that funds be released to translate case documents “Since the moment Mr and Mrs Martin came to me with the terrible story of their daughter’s death I have felt that there were many questions that the investigation left unanswered,” De Piero said in a statement the Martins want to know exactly what happened to Claire and will not rest until they do I urge the government to help them get the answers they strive for.” in digging deeper into what they see as flaws in the initial investigation the Italian authorities will be compelled to take a new look at their case There is also the possibility of uncovering evidence to spark another investigation which has happened in previous cases in Italy “I feel there’s been a complete injustice,” says Ray rolling off a series of questions about what happened to his daughter Pat says it is time they had the answers: “We have to have some kind of closure This is the archive of The Observer up until 21/04/2025 The Observer is now owned and operated by Tortoise Media.