One Volcano, Two Mouths

In the opening I spoke of a puppet and a puppet-master; in the first part, of the two great absentees from the Vicenza judgment — Solvay and DuPont. Here I take a step that changes the measure of everything. Spinetta Marengo and Trissino are not two stories that resemble each other: they are the same event. I tell them with the image that seems to me most exact — a volcano. A single magma chamber, two mouths erupting four hundred kilometres apart, a single cloud that has reached almost the whole of the North. It is a thesis, and I declare it as such: but it rests on facts, and the facts must be set out one by one.

1. A single magma chamber: cC6O4 is Solvay's

Everything stands, or falls, on a chemical point — the one that, judgment in hand, I set down in the first part: cC6O4 is not a generic pollutant; it is a molecule patented and registered by a single lead registrant. It is, in the proper sense, a signature, and the signature is one alone: Solvay, today Syensqo.[1] Wherever cC6O4 is found — in the Trissino aquifer, in the Po, in the air of Spinetta, in the blood of a Veneto or Piedmont worker — one finds something that bears a single name written upon it.

From this follows the weld. For years the affair was told as two distinct facts: at Trissino a small factory, Miteni, which dumps and goes bankrupt; at Spinetta a large plant with its historic problems. But if the substance is the same, and that substance is Solvay's, the two stories are one. I say it in the plainest way, because it is the key to the entire investigation: there is not a Miteni disaster and a different Solvay disaster; there is a single disaster, with two epicentres.[2] Miteni, at Trissino, did not produce cC6O4: it recovered it from the resins that arrived from Spinetta, extracted it and returned it to Solvay — the "resin cycle" that the judgment itself describes.[3] The to-and-fro of contaminated material between Piedmont and Veneto is not a logistical detail: it is the proof that the two sites were a single apparatus.

This is where the most convenient misunderstanding falls apart. As long as Syensqo is tied only to Spinetta, the picture breaks in two and each answers for its own. But once Syensqo is tied also to Miteni — because the cC6O4 at Trissino is its own, processed on its resins and returned to it — the unifying thread holds, and holds by itself. The directing hand, according to the reading I have filed with the Public Prosecutors, is one: Solvay governs the contamination, and its concealment, at the two sites it directs; DuPont enters from 2014 and aggravates the Veneto side with GenX.[4] This part — the directing hand, the external direction of Miteni — is my hypothesis, and I mark it as such. The chemical datum, by contrast, is established: cC6O4 is Solvay's. The first will have to be investigated; the second is not in question.

2. Two mouths, two elements

A volcano can have different mouths, and make them erupt in different ways. So it was here. The two epicentres did not pollute in the same way, and the difference does not separate them: it completes them.

At Trissino the mouth erupted into the water. The aquifers from which the aqueducts of the provinces of Vicenza, Verona and Padua draw are vulnerable; what Miteni discharged sank into the subsoil and spread, coming to appear kilometres away and, through the water network, well beyond.[5] At Spinetta the mouth erupted above all into the air. There the deep aquifer is better protected — thanks to the geology, not to any merit of those who polluted —, but from the plant's chimneys the cC6O4 came out and travelled.[6] Water to the east, air to the west: the same magma, two conduits. And the risk, in both cases, was shifted from those who generated it to those who had not chosen it — from one region to another, from one population to another. It is the logic that elsewhere is called, without mincing words, neocolonial: the dangers that can no longer be run in one place are transferred to where controls are weaker.[7]

3. A single cloud: almost the whole of the North

The consequence of two mouths and of a molecule made to travel is a cloud that does not stop at the borders of a province. cC6O4 has been detected in the Po as early as 2019, and from there in the aqueducts that draw from the river;[8] in Piedmont, in the drinking water of Turin and of some fifteen municipalities, as far as Bardonecchia, above 1,300 metres — an altitude to which groundwater does not rise, and which can be explained only by atmospheric transport;[9] traces have also been found in Lombardy. From west to east, the disaster covers almost the whole of the North of the country.[10]

It is worth pausing a moment on this phrase — almost the whole of the North — because it is exact, not emphatic. We are not speaking of the fence around two factories, but of the basin of Italy's largest river, which irrigates the fields, waters the animals, recharges the aquifers, and ends in the Adriatic. The population that for years drank water contaminated by mixtures of old and new PFAS is at least 350,000 people in the Veneto area alone;[11] the population reached, by way of water or air, by cC6O4 alone — a substance no one was looking for and for which no national legal limit exists — has not even been quantified. The honest question is not how many the exposed are. It is who, in the North, can say with certainty that they are safe.

4. Why it is a single offence

What has been said so far is chemistry and geography. But it has a legal consequence, and here I must be cautious, because we enter the terrain that the fourth part will treat at length. The consequence is simple: if the substance is one and the directing hand is one, then — this is my thesis — the criminally relevant event is one alone. Trissino and Spinetta are the two faces of a single disaster, whose effects extend from west to east. To break it up into local episodes makes no historical sense, and — I submit — no legal sense either.[12]

Criminal law is equipped for facts of this dimension. There is no need to "pierce the veil" of the legal person Miteni to reach those upstream: what is needed is to identify the human conducts that were the cause of the event.[13] The Vicenza Court of Assize convicted the perpetrator; but — I note it as a limit, not as an accusation against the judge — it could not grasp the unitary dimension of the catastrophe, because the charge before it was not unitary. The how — complicity, the liability of the producer of the waste, the comparison with the United States — is the heart of the fourth part. Here let the point suffice: a single volcano is, in law, a single fact.

5. An invisible volcano

And here lies the paradox that gives this investigation its name. An eruption can be seen. This one cannot. The largest environmental poisoning established in Italy, extending across almost the whole of the North, has remained — and in large part remains — invisible. Not because the data are lacking: because the name is. It has been told in pieces — the Veneto factory, the Piedmont plant, the river, the aquifers — and the pieces, separated, do not frighten. The convenient narrative, "Miteni the sole culprit", has acted as a lid: a bankrupt scapegoat, and the case is closed.[14] It is the same factory of doubt seen in the opening, but reversed: there, the toxicity of a molecule was being hidden; here, the unity of a disaster is being hidden. To fragment is the most effective way of making invisible what, whole, would be unbearable.

Invisibility, after all, is convenient. The same conducts that in the United States, for the same groups, have cost settlements and provisions of hundreds of millions and more — the American side we shall see — have in Italy not yet cost one euro nor a judgment on the merits. The specialist literature has a name for this too: justice arbitrage. Where justice enters, one pays; where it stops, one negotiates.[15] Keeping the disaster fragmented and nameless is the premise for justice, here, to stop.

6. The switched-off seismograph: the inertia of the Ministry

It remains to explain why the name is not pronounced where it would count most: at the top. There exists an instrument, in our legal system, made precisely for the gravest environmental emergencies of supra-regional scale — the Site of National Interest (Sito di Interesse Nazionale), which carries with it powers of coordination, resources, and the obligation of serious investigations and remediation. It is the seismograph that ought to register an eruption of these dimensions. For Spinetta and for Trissino it never went off: the Ministry of the Environment has instituted neither a single SIN nor two distinct SINs, even though the legal requirements are met.[16] In Italy no PFAS-contaminated site has ever been declared a SIN.[17]

It is the last link in a chain we have already travelled. In the opening it was the controllers closest at hand — Municipality, Province, Region, ARPA, ASL — who had looked elsewhere, each with its share of omission, at the two epicentres. Here it is the central level that repeats, on a national scale, the same gesture: not seeing. The logic of a single SIN would follow exactly the nature of the phenomenon — a single aquifer that knows no municipal boundaries, a single river, a single cloud. Not to institute it means choosing to treat a national disaster as a sum of local files: the administrative way of keeping it invisible.

I do not call it a conspiracy, and I have said so already: I call it a system of incentives. But the result, from the top to the bottom, is coherent and measurable: faced with a volcano with two mouths, the public apparatus kept the seismograph switched off. And a disaster that the State does not record is a disaster that the State does not have to repair.

Here the second part closes. We have given the event a name and a shape: one alone, with two mouths, extending across almost the whole of the North, and kept invisible. The third part does the count that no one has finished doing: the health toll of the disaster — first the workers, the most exposed and the least studied; then the dead and the sick among the population; finally what remains today, in the blood of those who live at the two epicentres and in their squares. The fourth will enter the judgment, and will show that the facts needed to bring the principals to court are already written. Already written. And, so far, unused.

A note on sources and method (Part II)

I distinguish the three levels. Established: the exclusive ownership of cC6O4 by Solvay (patent, REACH registration as lead registrant; Judgment of the Vicenza Court of Assize no. 1/25, p. 45), the "resin cycle" and the flows described in the judgment, the environmental measurements (ARPA, Greenpeace), the failure to institute a SIN. Stated: the corporate statements already referred to in the previous parts. Inferred: the characterisation of the fact as a unitary disaster under a single directing hand (Solvay/Syensqo, with DuPont/Chemours at Trissino from 2014) and as a single criminally relevant event — it is the thesis of my criminal complaints to the Public Prosecutors of Alessandria and Vicenza (6 October and 23 December 2025), a request for investigation, not a finding. The Miteni managers stand convicted at first instance; the liability of the principals upstream remains a hypothesis. The records not covered by secrecy will be published alongside the investigation.

whitecollarcrimes a collective byline · guarantor: Avv. Luca Santa Maria · 22 June 2026