A nasty shock for Lorenzo and Yvonne Forno as they were doing a spot of spring cleaning this morning. During the clean up of their cantina in Barga Vecchia a rusty world war II ammunition case was opened and surprise, surprise sitting in the bottom was none other than a world war II hand grenade, primed and ready to go. Lorenzo beat a hasty retreat and then phoned the police.. The cantina was then examined by the Carabinieri who found along with the hand grenade, a half a pound block of TNT explosive, luckily without a detonator and so of limited danger to those handling it. The American Mk 2 second world war hand grenade was potentially dangerous though and so the area was immediately sealed off until the arrival of the bomb disposal unit.
The Mk 2 was commonly known as a “pineapple” grenade, because of its distinctive shape. Grooves were cast into the cast iron shell to aid in gripping the grenade – this provision gave it the appearance of a pineapple fruit.
Italian bureaucracy then took charge of the situation and things slowed down quite considerably. In fact it was almost another three weeks before an army bomb disposal arrived in Barga Vecchia. In the meantime another hand grenade of the same American Mk 2 fragmentation type was found by workers extending and expanding the road leading to Ponte di Campia. This morning the bomb disposal unit destroyed all the objects in a controlled explosion in the gravel pits at Gallicano.
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Click on the link below to hear the voice (in English) of Lorenzo Forno as he waited for the Caribinieri to arrive at his house to defuse the hand grenade followed by a short interview (in Italiano) with the officer in charge of blowing up the device three weeks later.
