Going back to the opening post.
On my bus conversion course ground school, it was hammered into us that a 320 tends towards being tail heavy and to avoid passenger splits with front cabin empty and rear cabin full like the plague. This was already a well known problem in 2004.
Later in my career I had exactly this happen on a triangular charter where check in staff allocated passengers to the first destination to the front cabin and second destination the rear cabin despite company loading instructions being to divide destinations by left aisle and right aisles instead.
During disembarking at first destination I had the FO monitor the nose wheel strut extension. Sure enough the aircraft was going to go very nose wheel light. There then followed a period of musical chairs as transiting passengers were moved forward to reload the nose wheel. Nightmare as we had to do the same on boarding as the new passengers had been allocated seats in the front cabin based on the seating plan sent from our original departure point. All compounded by the baggage being loaded as per the passengers. First landing in the forward holds. Second in the rear. Would you believe that 3 weeks later, despite the air safety report I filed as well as complaining directly to tech management the same airport repeated the same offence. My comments were completely unprintable. The reason they gave was it was driven by making the baggage handling easy and keeping families together.
My awareness of the potential for loading issues goes back to flying freight in Shorts 360 where the rear hold being bigger than the forward hold was an obvious target for incorrect loading. In fact we had the habit of feeling the weight on the nose leg during the take off roll to check all was well . This probably saved the life of some friends when it was seriously out of balance and wanted to rotate of its own accord at about 30 kts.
To go back to the Verona incident if the passenger split was brought to the captains attention, then this elevates the incident gross professional negligence.