Fake News: The Gubbio Raw Fish Incident

DISCLAIMER: this stuff will contain a lot of NSFW italian language.

It is what it is.

For two days, the "Gubbio incident" captured all the italian media. The memes went viral. Radio and TV talked about it. On the 21th of October there where a whopping number of 12101 tweets with the "gubbio" keyword, in place of the normal number of under 50 tweets per day.

And here comes the gross part: what happened.

On October 19, 2022, a series of voice messages began to be broadcast on whatsapp groups describing an incident that occurred in a restaurant in the Umbrian city of Gubbio. The occasion was a lunch of the local fishing company, in which raw fish caught by the members of the group was served. This fish turned out to be intoxicated and this led to a case of group dysentery.
The voice messages, accompanied by photos, tell in a colorful way an apocalyptic scene of 30/40 people suffering from diarrhea who cannot reach the bathroom and do their needs where they can: inside the restaurant or in the parking area. The climax is rapresented by a scene where a drunken customer leaves with his car, crashes it against a tree, and is found by the police in his seat drenched from head to toe in his own feces.

The next day the case was debunked by the protagonists and the restaurant owners, who would have suffered enormous damage due to the negative publicity. Apparently the story isn't quite true but isn't completely false either. Indeed there was some kind of group intoxication and some people were sick, but it's not clear if any of the scenes told occurred. The photos were fake and taken from reddit.

But the story was so colorful that for a day it made everyone die laughing. Ironically, this happened on the very day of the birth of Giorgia Meloni's new far-right government. Probably with this and the power crisis looming we really needed a good laugh.

Here the translation of the 3 most popular tweets so far:

1. • hey granpa do you remember what day it was when the Meloni government was born? -I remember it well, it was the day of the diarrhea apocalypse in Gubbio
2. It is not clear where the government begins and where the Gubbio lunch ends.
3. "I have to s**t" is boring, used by everyone, predictable. "I'm having a Gubbio moment" is terrifying, intense, disturbing but also hilarious and above all it is based on historical events