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Death was not taken immediately. Some came to take us under a door, who under a doorpost, who under a ladder … The backbone of the earth broke, and the earth crumbled, fell in layers, along with the rain. Nothing was left in its place. It was the end of the world and a whole world. This is how Vinicio Capossela narrates it The country of the coppoloni the apocalypse of November 23, 1980. That world was Irpinia. When our Ulderico Munzi laboriously reached Lioni, amid the abysses, rubble, and destroyed roads, it was three in the morning. And his opening words would leave readers of the Messenger Service with a lump in the throat. This moon of Lyon, high in the sky, gives the faces of the living a dead paleness. Its glow on the rubble, on the shattered houses, on the dust still fills the icy air of the village … Lioni seems uninhabited. I see shadows moving in an inhuman silence, sometimes cracked by the moans and screams of the buried … “God, where are you?” Reacts a young woman looking at the starry sky. The son, the husband, the parents are under the rubble. The testimonies that recounted the commotion in that land already plagued by similar events in 1910, 1930, 1962 were harsh and moving … Terrifying figures, summarized by the historians Emanuela Guidoboni and Gianluca Valensise: 2,735 dead, some 9,000 injured and more than 394,000 homeless. Six countries completely landed, the building stock of a large area, from the mountains to the plains, severely affected. More than 77,340 houses destroyed, 275,260 seriously damaged. Magnitude 6.9 on the Richter scale.
The nude
Ettore Mo recounted the deposition in the plaza of coffins with the dead inside and the name inscribed with a small knife on the wood: Luongo Carmine, Marzullo Stefano, Rosamila Domenico … Vladimiro Settimelli, from the Unit, described a kind of terrace in front to a school where the bodies of ten, twenty, thirty, fifty poor women with swollen faces and mouths full of rubble had been deposited. Leonardo Sciascia felt shaken by the abuse of certain words: The manger-countries: one of the most rhetorical and disconcerting expressions that have come out of this great tragedy of the earthquake. Whoever reads or hears it does not know exactly what it means, but they glimpse the idyll, the serenity, the simplicity, the security of human relationships, the authenticity of things and men, the silence. Impressed by the fact that the catastrophe that suddenly came to erase everything, one is almost made to believe that it has erased that particular kind of life: life as a nativity scene in nativity scenes. But a moment of detachment, of reflection, is enough to become aware that this type of life had already been canceled for some time. The rubble between which the crowd accumulates is typical of the modern way of building. The houses were all built with concrete and in fact you can see huge white blocks from which dusty iron snakes twist and twist in the air, wrote Alberto Moravia, El collapse is explained, as always, by theft: iron is he spared in failing which the concrete, so to speak, falls apart. And the houses become tombs. And so the new hospital, inaugurated last year, collapsed, the sick died, the nurses died, the doctors died. And why did they die? Because there have been those who have stolen on cement like the dishonest merchant steals on weight.
Disputes
Between the tears of the children, the invocations of the firefighters, the reports of delays in the rescues, the volunteers exhausted by exhaustion, the Milanese taxi drivers who went into the darkness with the coeur in hand between those mountains to bring caravans of gift, screams when discovering people who may still be alive cut by bulldozers, at a certain point here is a flapping of wings: descended from the sky in a helicopter before bread, milk, blankets, shovels to remove the dead and the living, he wrote in Messenger Service Antonio Padellaro, Sandro Pertini suffers in Laviano, two thousand inhabitants, one thousand dead, the fiery insults of the survivors who, while the head of state walks through this graveyard of rubble, continues to dig with the force of bleeding hands … Pertini walks through his Way of the Cross also when a man who emerged from the ruins upon seeing that procession of knights, without even knowing who they are, begins to shout: “No show, shit, shit, I have my wife down there, screaming for two days” . Looking straight ahead without saying a word, burdened with all the shortcomings, delays, omissions made in the flesh of these unfortunate people, Pertini keeps walking … The next night, the president speaks on television: Italians and Italians, they are returned last night from the devastated areas…. He denounced that the necessary aid had not yet reached those countries 48 hours later. He explains that he has listened to the citizens, their despair and their pain, their anger. Confirm that there was no immediate help that should have been there. Remember: A desperate girl approached me, threw herself on my neck and told me crying that she had lost her mother, father and brothers. Trust the pride of the soldiers and the exhausted and hungry carabinieri have given the evacuees their ration of food. Prosecution: In 1970, Parliament passed laws on natural disasters. Now I learn that the implementing regulations for these laws have not been implemented.
The two Italians
Furious: What happened in Belize must not be repeated. Somehow it will get worse. Confirming the worried omens of southern connoisseurs such as Giovanni Russo and Corrado Stajano, who in several reports and the following year in the book Terremoto summarized in the subtitle all the problems of a complicated redemption: The two Italies on the rubble of the South, volunteers and victims , Camorra and unemployed, notables and racists, bourgeois and peasants, emigrants and vagabonds. Two Italians who didn’t even know each other moved by good feelings like a Milanese: ten minutes from a highway I discovered pockets of misery unimaginable for me, the other Italy. The first day I went into a hut where there were two old women, but looking back I don’t know how old they might be, and I asked how many there were in the family to fill out the form of the Municipality. One of the two responded: “Three. Me, my sister and her ”. I looked at who she was, it was the goat. She gave milk and cheese and was considered a person. Then I asked them if they needed some warmth, their feet were wet, they wore woolen things with holes. And they answered: “We already have three golf courses” Those from the north, especially those from the north, only later understood what southern Italy was, explains Antonello Caporale in Terremoto SpA. They went back half a century and found the poverty of unknown valleys , steep slopes far from the sea, far from the eyes and heart of advanced Italy […]. They did not think that we were so reduced, that the level of precariousness, if not poverty, was so dazzling, dense, sharp. A distance that, over the years and the progressive discovery of scams and intrigues (more in Naples and its surroundings than in Irpinia and Basilicata) will lead to a greater impoverishment and depopulation of the affected areas and a progressive mutual mistrust. Reinforce stereotypes of untrustworthy southerners in the north and cynical profiteers in the south. All put the accent on waste, patronage, embezzlement, writes Toni Ricciardi who together with Generoso Picone and Luigi Fiorentino, signed The Irpinia earthquake, edited by Donzelli, but that the great works were contracted almost exclusively to large Companies from the North matter little, that a large part of the financing of the so-called factories of the mountains was directed to businessmen from the North, just a detail. But we write it separately.
November 22, 2020 (change November 23, 2020 | 08:36)
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