She will grow in another town maybe, or in a small wooden cottage in the countryside some miles from the city. Her mother will tell her, when she will be in her teen years, how girls and boys in the abandoned town used to walk up and down the Portici, meet in the square or at the Quattro Cantoni, and she will be shown pictures of the great basilicas, not yet restored and open to the public. She will sure get tired of hearing all these "before the earthquake" stories maybe, some day, as we got tired of the "during the war" of our parents.
She is the future. We that lived before the earthquake, and are living during the earthquake that continues to shatter what we can recover of our certainties, we are old inside, I fear we will be satisfied with rebuilding the bare minimum to finish living our lives with dignity. We are old because we saw younger ones die before us, because what we had built through decades of mortgage, sacrifice, hard work, good and bad times, is unrecognizable debris which the excavators are mixing together and carrying away to landfills.
Her eyes are pure joy of living the present. We all should learn from her, that is happy because she has all the people she needs around her, and seems to say "the rest will come". There is something subtly sick in a civilization that gives too much importance to things, more importance than to people - it is true that after a car accident, after the initial panic and "God bless nobody's hurt", we start to think of the damages to the car. We are learning to travel light, and "after the earthquake" we have actually given up the surplus of clothes, shoes, socks, the abundance of dishes and glasses in the huge kitchen… I had 150 square meters to look after, always in a mess because of the little time and three children, now that house, though recoverable, is alien to me, I actually do not need too much to live decently well, not even 1% of whatever is in the house now.
But Cristiana already knows this, that I needed an earthquake to realize. She has that absolute innocence of the great spirits of our history, the Mahatma Gandhi that did not even wear shoes and had the same simple garment in winter and in summer, and knew that people were the only important things in life. Please teach me to be happy with the present, with the sun shining today and the meal we are having this dinner, the nice ice-cream we just enjoyed, let the nostalgia of the past go, and not worry too much about a future that cannot yet take any shape.