Wednesday, April 08, 2009


The earthquake in Abruzzo has kept all of us busy the last three days. But I knew from my friends in L'Aquila that already for a couple of months they felt weekly some small shocks. Point is, nobody ever talked about this. In Italy people are discovering only now how bad the situation is.

You get an idea from the picture above, it is the helft of the house of my aunt Vittoria. She slept in the broken down part, they recovered her body yesterday.

Miss Kappa is one of my blogger friends who was rescued from under the ruins of her house by her husband and neighbours. At the moment they are living in the emergency tents camp in l'Aquila. She and her family lost everything, except the will to tell the world that the authorities are lying now on the actual nummbers (they claim 200 dead, she thinks is more 1000), and they refuse to take responsability for not warning the population on time.

I can imagine now that the situation is horribly confused and that the prioritites are finding people still alive under the ruins (just now the saved a young woman after 42 hours under her house) and curing and sheltering the survivors. Communication is therefore not ideal, which is a bit ironic if you think how the global media have been covering the event those days.

I am not even sure if they already have plans to bury the dead, and if there are going to be proper funerals, if the families have to organize this, of is there a masterplan for this sort of acts of god.

We only know we lost my auntie Vittoria in Onna, the last of the matriarchs of the Silvestroni family from Ofena. In the coming days I will try to post daily all info I can collect, especially for you guys overseas. For me it is quite unreal to watch these pictures of ruins and recognize places where I used to live, to study and to work. May this is the difference: I can name most of these pictures (luckily, not the people I've seen in them).

The church of Santa Maria a Paganica above is one of the many ruined monuments. I used to sit often on the staircase right. I hope, and I will work on this, that in the future, once the most urgent problems are solved, that I can help restore as much as possible as it was.

How arroganrt, really, of Mr. Berlusconi, to claim as a first thing that we need nobody's help to recover from this drama. We must gratefully accept all possible help. Because this is the place I want my children to call theirs. Their home in Italy.

Credits pictures: I took them from the website of de Spiegel, if I am breaking any copyright law, please contact me and I will take them away

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