Amatrice, the story of Pietro and the rebirth after the earthquake

He attends primary school in Amatrice and is the symbol of the rebirth of his town. Pietro, eight years old, is the first child in the town born after the 2016 earthquake and his mother Amalia Casini, who lost several family members during the earthquake, never thought of leaving the city. On the contrary. "Our future is here - she says with conviction despite the difficulties of an infinite reconstruction and the many false restarts of the city - We survivors have been given a second chance".

On August 24, ten years ago, Amalia, now fifty years old, managed to escape the collapses but within a few hours she became aware of her personal tragedy: her brother, her sister-in-law, her eighteen-year-old niece and her in-laws died in the rubble of the earthquake.

"Our house, we were supposed to live with my husband and my first nine-year-old daughter, was luckily earthquake-proof. After the tremors - she remembers - I tried to reach my brother's family but the historic center where he lived was blocked and I couldn't cross the street, so I rushed to my in-laws.

When I arrived only the roof remained. I wandered desperately among the remains of that house that no longer existed, I called them trying to understand where the rooms were but I had no answers." Then the days lived as displaced persons. "We lived with the family in the car and in a caravan, until they called us to identify our family members, the same people I had searched for in vain in the first minutes after the tremors." Life continued despite everything: Amalia took her daughter to school and they ate together with her husband in the fields equipped with tents for displaced people. After a year she opened a laundry, the same one that her sister had decided to open before everything collapsed in the earthquake. The desire to have a second child remained.

"Even though the doctors told me that I wouldn't be able to have any more, in that period I conceived Pietro, born in 2018: I remember that, while I was giving birth in the hospital in Rieti, in the delivery room I had in front of me the giant photo of the panorama of Amatrice before the earthquake. For the whole community, that birth, until then believed impossible, was considered a miracle and immediately for all my fellow citizens Pietro was the symbol of a new life possible in our land, even after the earthquake. I'm also proud of it because this story has given many people the strength to move forward."

But not everyone in the village reacted in the same way to the catastrophe of ten years ago. "I believe that the earthquake has brought out of us what we thought was unthinkable: there are those who managed to roll up their sleeves and move forward, but also those who remained stuck that night and are now terrified of returning to their rebuilt houses." The town is still a huge construction site, but Amalia is sure: "I, my husband, my daughter and my son Pietro will never leave Amatrice". And he admits: "I would just like to have a new normality soon, maybe go back to wearing heels and not walking in the dust."