Easy rider: riding on a sofa on top of a car

A boy blissfully lying on a sofa, loaded onto the roof of an old white Fiat Panda driving through the traffic on the streets of Catania in Sicily, as if it was nothing out of the ordinary. All captured in a short video that ended up on social media on the afternoon of Saturday November 4 and went viral in a few hours on TikTok.

The next day, local police tracked down the driver of the Panda, who was charged with several traffic violations. Through the analysis of the images and after a brief investigation, the officers of the Borgo Ognina police station identified the owner of the car, a 43-year-old woman, and then traced it back to the driver of the car, her 41-year-old husband.

According to what the police reconstructed, the 41-year-old, together with a friend, after collecting a sofa from an acquaintance who wanted to get rid of it, loaded it onto the roof of the car to take it home. Once back in the car, a young man climbed onto the roof of the Panda, lying on the sofa and being carried along the city’s ring road.

The driver, after justifying himself by telling the officers that he,”did not realise he was carrying a young man lying on the sofa”, (which the police obviously considered implausible), was fined several hundred euros and several points were deducted from his driving licence.

A few days ago, also in Catania, a 15-year-old boy was caught on video going around the city sitting on a sofa mounted on an electric scooter.