Stanislao G. Pugliese: Earthquake at the Door
[Stanislao G. Pugliese is a professor of European history at Hofstra University and the author of the forthcoming “Bitter Spring: A Life of Ignazio Silone.”]
THE wolves came at night, crazed by the scent of lost sheep without shepherds and bodies buried beneath the rubble. In the early hours of Jan. 13, 1915, an earthquake had rocked the rugged Abruzzo region of Italy. In Pescina, birthplace of the writer Ignazio Silone, 3,500 of the town’s 5,000 residents had perished in a matter of 30 seconds.
Among the dead were Silone’s beloved mother, whose body he dug from the rubble with his own hands. After several days of desperate labor, the 14-year-old Silone freed his only surviving family member, a younger brother.
In a twist of fate that surprised no one, the only house left undamaged was uninhabited. At night, the howling of the wolves, combined with the cries of those still trapped beneath the rubble, ensured that no one would sleep. The earthquake and the wolves would torment Silone for the rest of his life. And all of his work — including his most famous novels, “Fontamara” and “Bread and Wine” — bears the often subtle, sometimes vivid imprint of the catastrophe.
“When the earthquake demolished the houses,” one of his characters notes in “The Seed Beneath the Snow,” “it exposed things that generally remain hidden.”
And so history repeated itself on Monday in L’Aquila, 25 miles from Pescina, when the cupola of an 18th-century church, Santa Maria del Suffragio, cracked open during a 6.3 magnitude earthquake to reveal the stucco patterns inside....
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THE wolves came at night, crazed by the scent of lost sheep without shepherds and bodies buried beneath the rubble. In the early hours of Jan. 13, 1915, an earthquake had rocked the rugged Abruzzo region of Italy. In Pescina, birthplace of the writer Ignazio Silone, 3,500 of the town’s 5,000 residents had perished in a matter of 30 seconds.
Among the dead were Silone’s beloved mother, whose body he dug from the rubble with his own hands. After several days of desperate labor, the 14-year-old Silone freed his only surviving family member, a younger brother.
In a twist of fate that surprised no one, the only house left undamaged was uninhabited. At night, the howling of the wolves, combined with the cries of those still trapped beneath the rubble, ensured that no one would sleep. The earthquake and the wolves would torment Silone for the rest of his life. And all of his work — including his most famous novels, “Fontamara” and “Bread and Wine” — bears the often subtle, sometimes vivid imprint of the catastrophe.
“When the earthquake demolished the houses,” one of his characters notes in “The Seed Beneath the Snow,” “it exposed things that generally remain hidden.”
And so history repeated itself on Monday in L’Aquila, 25 miles from Pescina, when the cupola of an 18th-century church, Santa Maria del Suffragio, cracked open during a 6.3 magnitude earthquake to reveal the stucco patterns inside....