The Italian girl was in her family flat when she crawled onto the balcony and fell 30 metres from the fifth floor of the building.
The man, Mattia Aguzzi, was on his way to buy groceries.
“I’d just left my apartment with my girlfriend when we heard some shouting and screaming from a building down the road,” he told Italian news outlet, Sky24.
“We saw the child was on the edge of the balcony – I don’t know how long she had been there for – I ran underneath and started shouting at her not to move and to stay still.
“Then she just fell and I positioned myself so that I could catch her and she fell into my arms.
“I just closed my eyes and hoped for the best and it all worked out well – to be honest it wasn’t really a catch it was more of cushioning her and we both fell to the floor.
“When she started to cry I was relieved because I knew she wasn’t dead and even I had to sit down and gather my breath, because the impact was so strong.”
Footage filmed immediately after the incident shows Mattia standing to the right, while police and paramedics check the child, who miraculously escaped unhurt.
While Italy’s Carabinieri police force are investigating the circumstances of the incident, the girl’s mother, who has not been named, earlier told police she was ‘doing housework’ and lost sight of her daughter, and when she looked on the balcony noticed she was gone and heard screaming.
On Monday, Aguzzi met the little girl for the first time after the incident, in the hospital, where she had been taken for shock.
“I was relieved to see her smiling and in such good condition,” he said.
Commenting further on the headline-grabbing incident, Aguzzi said that now he had performed such an apparently athletic feat, “[maybe] they’ll stop telling me I need to lose weight”.
“I’m not a hero, I was just there by chance,” he added.
Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, expressed her gratitude on X (formerly Twitter), posting: “The story of the child falling from the fifth-floor balcony in Turin could have turned into a tragedy.
“But thanks to the alertness of Mattia Aguzzi, who saw her falling, her life was saved. Grateful thanks and honour to this young hero.”
ANSA
