Lucrezia Ciotti For more than forty years, he has lived with a fractured truth, pieced together halfway between family silences and unhealed traumas. But today, decades after that bloody night that forever marked his life, the Monster of Florence survivor breaks his silence with a shocking revelation: "I just discovered who my real father is." A discovery that sheds new light on one of the darkest cases in Italian history.
The Monster of Florence series on Netflix
The infamous case of the Monster of Florence will be the focus of a new Netflix miniseries, coming out on October 22nd , the date on which the platform will celebrate its tenth anniversary in Italy. The project, simply titled Il Mostro (The Monster ), will consist of four episodes directed by Stefano Sollima, a director known for successful crime films such as Gomorrah , Romanzo Criminale , Suburra , and Adagio.
The cast will include actors such as Marco Bullitta, Valentino Mannias, Francesca Olia, Liliana Bottone, Giacomo Fadda, Antonio Tintis and Giordano Mannu.
The series will retrace the eight double murders committed between 1974 and 1985 with a .22 Beretta, a weapon never recovered, which became the killer's signature weapon. For seventeen years, the Monster sowed terror in Tuscany and throughout Italy, sparking one of the longest and most controversial investigations in national crime history.
Despite decades of investigations, numerous suspects, and several arrests, many questions remain unanswered, and some investigative leads remain open. Among the most distressing hypotheses that have emerged over time, the possibility that the true culprit may have evaded justice and remains a mystery to this day has never been ruled out.
Natalino Mele and the breakthrough regarding his biological father: a deepening mystery
Along with the promotion of the Netflix series, the figure of Natalino Mele has returned to the spotlight, the sole survivor of the crime that took place on the night between August 21 and 22, 1968, when Barbara Locci and her lover Antonio Lo Bianco were shot dead while driving in their car.
Barbara's son Natalino was just seven years old at the time and was found the next morning outside a farmhouse more than two kilometers from the scene of the attack: he was barefoot but wearing immaculate socks, visibly confused. Law enforcement identified the crime scene thanks to the testimony of the man who had rescued him. A contemporary report reported that the boy claimed to have been brought there by a man who sang "La Tramontana" to him , but years later he denied this recollection , claiming he remembered nothing from the night of the murder. Stefano Mele, Barbara's husband and Natalino's legal father, was charged and convicted of that double crime, although he was deemed partially incompetent.
Just recently, an unprecedented development emerged from the investigation: the Prosecutor's Office informed Natalino Mele, now 62, that his biological father is not Stefano Mele , but Giovanni Vinci. Vinci is the brother of Francesco Vinci, who was previously identified as a prime suspect and even arrested in 1982 on charges of being the Monster, before being cleared the following year when the killer struck again during his detention. Stefano Mele had already named Francesco as his wife's alleged lover and possible perpetrator of the 1968 murder, but his statements were not considered credible at the time.
The new discovery raises a possible scenario: Francesco Vinci could have spared Natalino precisely because he was the son of his brother Giovanni. This disturbing possibility brings the focus back to a story that remained suspended for years between declared culprits, unsolved mysteries, and truths never fully clarified. Today, all the direct protagonists of that night are deceased, except Natalino, who remains the only living witness to a still-dark chapter in Italian history.