Minutes before the fire, they were laughing on the phone: What Riccardo Minghetti told his best friend that still haunts her after his death

“Just minutes earlier, I was wishing him a Happy New Year.
Now, he’s in a cold coffin.”

Those are the words 15-year-old Ludovica will carry for the rest of her life.

To the world, Riccardo Minghetti is one of the 40 victims of the devastating Crans-Montana fire. Another name on a growing list. Another face in a tragic headline.

But to Ludovica, he was everything else.

He was her best friend, her confidant, her swimming partner — the one person she trusted with every fear and every dream.

A New Year’s Eve that should have been ordinary

On New Year’s Eve, the two teenagers were not partying. They were on the phone.

They laughed about their holidays. They talked about school. They even planned a school assembly they would organize together once classes resumed.

“He was so mature,” Ludovica says quietly. “He always listened. He always understood.”

Nothing felt urgent. Nothing felt final.

Until it was.

When the fireworks faded — and his voice disappeared

As midnight passed and fireworks cracked across the sky, Riccardo’s voice began to change.

Then it stopped.

Inside Le Constellation, the club had already become what survivors would later call a “windowless trap.” Thick black smoke. No air. No escape.

In seconds, Riccardo’s future — his plans, his kindness, his quiet strength — were swallowed whole.

“He never hung up,” Ludovica reveals. “The line just… went silent.”

A loss too heavy for words — and a secret she can’t share

Now, Ludovica wakes up every day with a void that refuses to close.

She replays that call.
She re-reads old messages.
She waits for a notification that will never come.

But there is something else she carries — something she hasn’t told anyone.

“There are things Riccardo said to me in that last call,” she admits. “Things I still don’t have the courage to repeat.”

What were those words?
A fear?
A warning?
A goodbye he didn’t know was final?

For now, Ludovica keeps that secret to herself.

When a childhood ends in seconds

Riccardo Minghetti didn’t just die in a fire.

He was taken from a life still unfolding — from friendships, from school corridors, from dreams that had barely begun to form.

And for Ludovica, time has split into two impossible halves:

Before the call.
And after.

She wished him a Happy New Year.

The next moment, the world took him away.