Faces in the wind

Almost three years after the devastating earthquake that struck central Italy, Norcia is a town that still bears the scars of the disaster. The Basilica of San Benedetto literally gutted, the buildings of the historic centre unusable and on the verge of collapse. Walking through the battered streets of the town, you are dismayed, stunned, turned to stone by the devastation the earthquake caused. It doesn't seem possible that it is real; it must be a film, a movie set; they must be shooting a documentary; this isn't real, it must be a documentary about the bombing of Afghanistan, of Iraq... it can't be real. That is what keeps going round in your head as you look at all that horror. But then you see something that cannot be fake, cannot be a cinematic invention: faces. Faces that vibrate with a life that is no longer theirs, faces printed on T-shirts once white and now yellowed by time, faces caressed by the wind, the faces of children, many children, too many children, the faces of grandmothers, of mothers, of teenage girls, faces united by tragedy, broken lives, buried lives, buried under the rubble of the village of Pescara del Tronto. There is too much pain in these places, a pain that must not be hidden, a pain that must be shouted at the top of one's lungs, denounced, because life must flow again through the streets of those towns, because we cannot just let it be and forget, because those who will live forever with the horror of those memories cannot go on living among the ruins! All this is inhuman, intolerable, indecent! And so dismay gives way to anger, an anger that is finding an outlet in these lines, because we cannot forget, because something must be done, anything, so that these deaths are not in vain, so that life may be reborn from destruction. LET US NOT FORGET THEM. THE TOWNS STRUCK BY THE EARTHQUAKE MUST LIVE AGAIN. RECONSTRUCTION MUST START NOW!