Life in Italy’s earthquake triangle: ‘ You can’t live in fear’
First funerals held in mourning nation
“I don’t know if it means we are lucky, or that we are next.” Paolo Santini, who lives in Posta, a town largely spared by Wednesday’s quake
POSTA, ITALY Paolo Santini knows the fear of living in an area periodically ravaged by earthquakes.
Santini, 50, a restaurant owner and poet, has lived most of his life in Posta, a town of 800 in central Italy’s Apennine mountains. The three most powerful earthquakes in Italy in the past 20 years — with epicenters in Umbria, L’Aquila, and Wednesday’s magnitude- 6.2 quake near Amatrice that killed 291 — form a triangle, with Posta right in the middle. And yet the town has for the most part remained unscathed.
“I don’t know if it means we are lucky, or that we are next,” Santini said with a laugh.
“I think the fear that it can happen makes people more resilient,” he added. “You feel the ground shake at night, so to be safe you go outside, sleep in your car and when it’s OK in the morning you go back in. It becomes part of everyday life.”
Marco Pastore, 30, a store clerk who lives in nearby Borbona, a village of 650 people, agreed.
“It’s normal,” Pastore said. “You can’t live in fear of the next earthquake because you’d go crazy. You have to accept it and try not to think about it.”
On Saturday, the first funerals were held for some of the victims as the coun- try observed a day of national mourning. In Amatrice, where 230 people died, more victims had been found overnight in the rubble.
About 400 people were injured and many driven out of their collapsed homes. At least 2,100 people are living in makeshift tent cities.
Because Post and Borbona were largely unscathed, the area emerged as a base of operations for many rescue workers. Some said the damage was enough to dissuade them from living in a place at such severe risk of earthquakes.
“After what I’ve seen the last couple of days, I don’t know if I could live in a place like this,” said Renato Turate, 36, who lives near Milan. Turate said he helped to pull two bodies from the rubble, including that of a young girl.
“It’s a beautiful area, and the people are very kind,” he said. “But what I have seen is too terrible to think about.”
Santini said it is necessary to have a short memory to thrive in this part of central Italy.
“If you dwell on what happens, you won’t make it,” he said. “It’s like the woman who gives birth to a child. If she remembers the pain she will never have a second one. But instead she focuses on the joy of motherhood and she forgets the pain, and that allows her to have the next child.”