Diary from L'Aquila

The so many lighter shocks warned us for 3 months that there WAS danger, but we did not listen, we had forgotten the danger and were making our houses more attractive but not safer. We had forgotten the lessons of centuries gone by, forgotten that Nature is a life giver, but a pitiless life taker as well, had lost contacts with our well known sismic soil, with the knowledge of centuries, as the man who builds his house on sand and the high tide comes and takes everything away. Like this man who thinks no tide will come, we wanted to deny that big earthquakes DO come.

Our land is a young land, earthquakes are like juvenile hormones, earthquakes are natural. People are not killed by earthquakes, they are killed by their homes, by the furniture inside the homes. Those who rented to students unsafe houses were making profit, builders were earning more they should have from the sale of unsafe houses to the innocent people who paid for them, for a heap of crumbling ruins (...a heap of broken images...), with the flesh and blood of their children, with their desperate tears on untimely coffins.

The old hermit from Molise, Pietro Angelieri, would have spoken as the thunder on these sins. He wanted people to understand that God's words are not metaphors. When we recite in the Our Father prayer "rimetti a noi i nostri debiti, come noi li rimettiamo ai nostri debitori" the old hermit wanted his rich citizens to really cancel the debts that poorer people had to repay. Some richer Aquilans, some people with power, were unduly making profits. God sacrifices his innocent son to redeem mankind's sins. It seems to me the earthquake took the innocent, the most beautiful, the purest first. As in the Greek tragedy, the sacrificial victim brings catharsis. Tragedy gives way to a different world, another landscape of the soul takes shape where only what is really important stays. Life is what stays.