11 April, 5 a.m. - We have - I cannot say "here" now, I am 100 km from L'Aquila - so it is "there", a kind of saying - L'Aquila bella me' - used to refer to times gone by, when things were better, different, a nostalgia for older ways of life. This saying is being now repeated in so many ways, not with nostalgia for when people behaved differently, but with that pain that clutches the stomach - each very little detail in walls and alleys that we unconsciously learned by heart walking by every day of every month of every year - the landmarks of our landscape, are scattered somewhere, anywhere, in the Waste Land, but it is so huge in the landscape of memory. The town could be reconstructed using the living memory of the Aquilans, if there were no pictures, no GoogleMaps... no street plan - a true "Atlante della Memoria" as my final-grade class entitled last January their multimedia work on episodes of WW2, which included also Onna, Paganica, Filetto.
The Aquilans are orphans that feel so moved now by all the people that in a way or another have literally adopted them. A child is given for adoption because he has nothing, and most Aquilans now have just themselves. In the houses are pictures of weddings, family albums, children's drawings pasted on refrigerators, the unreplaceable bytes of memory for which no backup exists. As an elderly lady - a proper metaphor of Abruzzo - said crying, in the embrace of Premier Berlusconi "Help me please, help me, I lost everything, I have not even my teeth".
