On Monday 12 October, I was at Onna. Our collection of funds has reached 55,000 euro. I have made an agreement with the charity Onna ONLUS and with the town authorities to define a reconstruction project in which the Blog can contribute with the amount it has collected.
My words are inadequate to describe the feeling of powerlessness and anger that you feel when faced with the rubble of this village that is 7 kilometres from L'Aquila. I am publishing an extract from the book by Samanta Di Persio called "Ju Tarramutu".

From the book by Samanta Di Persio called "Ju Tarramutu":

"I liked being in Onna. I had my roots here, my family. I had restructured my house, the outbuildings round about. Since January I had been doing work on an old barn, where I wanted to create a little living room. I had created a tiny village within the village. During the 1990s we had restructured the part where my daughter, Maria Paola, slept. We spent a lot of money {…} My father and I were convinced, I don’t know why, that because the houses were leaning one against the other, that in some way they would remain standing. Instead, the part where my son Domenico slept, collapsed because it was pushed down by the house next door, where my father Domenico lived. He too died. Onna’s earthquake was mad. The day of the funerals, mayor Cialente told me that according to the figures they had the maximum value of the earthquake in Onna was 7. My wife and I were saved because the part in the centre stayed up. The clear memory that I have is the noise like a “cocktail shaker”. Up until 1:00 am, I was reassuring Maria Paola. At 3:32 am, the tremor started. My wife woke up. I hugged her tight and she said: “Something has fallen onto the bed.” […] From the “Civil Protection” there were some seismologists who were calming us down. The tremors started officially in December. As the deputy head of redaction of “Centro”, every time there was a tremor, they called the Ingv { Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia = National Geophysics and Vulcanology Institute}, and every time they repeated that almost surely there would not be the destructive tremor. The director and the head of redaction are from Naples and they lived through the experience of Irpinia, thus they wanted us to give out information, to talk about the tremors, and the fault lines. When three months had gone by, you started to joke about things. At the end of March I wrote an article in the newspaper: “Hands up anyone who is not sleeping with one foot out of bed?” By then it wasn’t so much about whether there was an earthquake but people were betting on the magnitude. You never thought of anything worse than that, perhaps because we have short memories. The book by the writer Maurilio Di Giangregorio explains that already in 1800, in L'Aquila it was dangerous. We were waiting for the result of the meeting on 31 March with the Great Risks Commission, the mayor, and the cabinet members. The newspaper had prepared a big page with the number of tremors, the intensity and where and when they happened. They said: “It’s all OK!” Now they are discovering the various fault lines, including the one at Paganica that hadn’t been studied much. The experts should have said that this earthquake swarm could have been the precursor of a strong tremor. If you stay in a house made of reinforced concrete: you can be fairly tranquil; in a house made of stone: watch out. If I had been warned like that , perhaps I would have thought of going outside, of sleeping in the car. As an operator of information, I was badly informed. And as a consequence, I gave out bad information. The paradox is that the first victim was me.
The experts and the local authorities, where were they? The mayor and the top level authorities of Civil Protection, can do and undo things. I was wondering how is it that the local authorities told us nothing. So I called the deputy mayor Riga and asked him: “Given that there are all these tremors, has an evacuation plan been worked out?" He said yes. So I added: “Let’s publish it on all the local media.” He said: “We can’t have a press conference; otherwise we are risking creating alarmism.” At that time, the readers were calling me at the newspaper, one in particular telephoned me three days before 6 April, he lived in Pettino and he said to me: “But is it possible with all these tremors, that they are saying nothing, where we have to go…” I called the local authorities once more and I got the same responses. Even friends in Onna were looking for me. Luana phoned me many times, she was worried because she had a two year old daughter. She died under the rubble. One day I met Gabriella in front of the house and she asked me the same questions. She too died. They played with people’s lives […] . To reconstruct L’Aquila isn’t just a matter of providing a roof. What hurts is not being able to find your stuff anymore, that corner, those colours, those smells that belonged to you. Even if you reconstruct Onna, it’ll never be the same as before, you will smell the newness.

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