Secret of Italian airport's red suitcase is timing, says estate agent

Anyone who flies in and out of Malpensa airport, near Milan, often will know it – the mysterious battered red suitcase. Every so often, minutes after the arrival of a flight, it comes trundling along the relevant carousel, which then stops. The red suitcase sits in proud, if shabby, isolation for 10 or 20 minutes until the carousel jerks back into action and the rest of the luggage comes through. No one had ever dared try to open the red suitcase. But then along came Andrea Magnoni, a 43-year-old London-based estate agent whose courage was matched only by his curiosity. After disembarking a flight from Berlin, he told Corriere della Sera , "I took a good look at the [red] suitcase, establishing there was no label to indicate either its origin or destination. So I opened it, sure in the knowledge it belonged to no one." What he found inside were neither explosives, nor drugs, nor clothing, but "some magazines and polystyrene". It raises an intriguingly existential question: why the red suitcase? Magnoni thinks he knows. The appearance of the orphan luggage, he said, "stops the timer that appears on the monitor and indicates the time elapsed between touchdown and the delivery of the first bag". To prove his point, he attached a photograph of the screen showing his Air Berlin flight arriving at 20.15 and the first bag miraculously delivered two minutes later. The red suitcase, Magnoni alleged, was part of a "typically Italian stratagem" intended to "influence international statistics and the rating of the airport's service quality". Dozens of other frequent fliers wrote to Corriere saying that they also knew of the red suitcase, and backed Magnoni's view of its diabolical purpose. Italy's civil aviation authority, Enac, said it was looking into the matter. A spokesman for the company that handled the baggage from Magnoni's flight denied it owned the red suitcase. The spokesman said records showed the luggage took 16 minutes to arrive, adding: "It may be that someone pressed the timer button by mistake."