The church was founded by Pietro del Morrone, a hermit who, at the age of eighty-five, was chosen by a curia of calculating cardinals to become Pope Celestine V. He was crowned not in Rome, but here at L’Aquila in this new church, consecrated in 1288 on the spot where he had seen a vision of the Virgin Mary. After just five months in the role, enduring contention and manipulation, Celestine abdicated, the only pope to do so until Benedict XVI in 2013, and returned to his previous quiet existence. But during his term he instituted a Feast of Forgiveness modelled on the Old Testament notion of the Jubilee: every twenty-five or fifty years, a year was set aside during which all sins were pardoned, prisoners and slaves freed, debts were forgiven, peace was declared between warring nations and everything could begin again from a fresh, untainted start. It’s from Leviticus: ‘And ye shall hallow the fiftieth year and proclaim liberty throughout the land.’
In L’Aquila, the pope decreed that for 24 hours from the 28th to the 29th of August each year all who wished to be freed of sin should repent and confess before making their way to this church on Collemaggio, singing and dancing, where they would be granted complete absolution.
They still process each year, as the culmination to a week of festivity. In August 2014, for example, the week of the Pardon will see the centre of the city ‘joyously invaded’ by buskers from the Ferrara Buskers Festival, concerts both outdoor and indoor in Piano’s auditorium. There is ZULU Fashion, a hip-hop competition and aerosol art with DJ KONE, literary readings, photography and art exhibitions, and a rugby match in the Tommasso Fattori stadium. And finally, mayor and civic and clerical dignitaries, townspeople, representatives of L’Aquila Rugby in their team colours, and a young woman who carries the cylinder in which the papal document is sealed, process to this door. They knock on it with an olive branch, and the service of forgiveness begins.
A year after the quake, Francesco himself staged one of his sacre rappresentazioni in the basilica, which had been stabilised sufficiently to permit entry. He staged a work dating from the thirteenth century, in which the three Maries come to the tomb where Jesus has been buried and find him risen. The role of the Virgin Mary was taken by a young Italian pop singer, for that is how these things were done before music split into those deadly categories of highbrow and lowbrow. Now, once more in an inclusive era, a young woman sang the words and notes of lamentation in a thirteenth-century church and the statue that is the risen Christ was carried down the aisle with the Maries following after as the great finale. The voices sang, asking a benevolent God for protection, from plague and war and in a moment my friend Kathryn tells me took on a special power, from ‘terremoto’, the moving earth, the quake that had destroyed the homes and businesses and daily routines of the people standing within this damaged church. And as one, they rose: the hairdressers and electrical repairers, the hotel receptionists and students and academics, the people of the wheelbarrow, the café waiters and council staff, the nurses and carpenters and reconstruction workers, and they followed the singers around the church. It wasn’t planned. It simply happened because it felt like the right thing to do.
I knew nothing about Celestine V, or any other popes for that matter. Their names appeared on the Vincentian calendar that hung above our dining table but I took little of that in and by the time I was fifteen I had decided it was all nonsense anyway: medieval fantasy that could not compete with the power of scientific fact. I was just waiting for Richard Dawkins to come along and spell it out. And that is pretty much how I remain. So when Francesco showed me the Porta Santa I could only nod. Yes, it was old. Yes, it was beautiful. But yes, this notion of simply ruling a line under human failings and declaring forgiveness for oneself and everyone else sounds like a wonderful idea. It still does.
Forgiveness and retribution are a theme in L’Aquila, as they are in Christchurch. L’Aquila has become identified internationally with post-quake retribution. We talked about this, Francesco and I, as we walked about the city.
IN VOLATILE REGIONS, PEOPLE LEARN to adapt. When seismic swarms begin to gather in strength and frequency it has been habitual in Abruzzo to move outdoors to sleep, in parks or city squares, or in more recent times, in cars or campervans. Long experience renders people sensitive to signs that may or may not prove to be scientifically sound. When I was growing up we paid attention to hedgehogs. If they stopped their customary snuffling in the dry leaves outside our windows, particularly after a period of sustained sultry weather, our mother anticipated the worst. ‘Earthquake weather,’ she called it. I can’t recall if she was ever proved right.
In L’Aquila, an English biologist reported that the toads she had been studying in a local lake had completely disappeared five days before the quake. Five days later, they returned. They were sensitive, she postulated, to the presence of charged particles and gases.
She reported her findings after the quake had struck. But well before the quakes, a local laboratory technician, Giampaolo Giuliani, had also been studying gas emissions. For many years he had been measuring emissions of radon gases in a self-made network of monitors set about the perimeter of the city. In the months preceding the quake when the region was experiencing swarms of small tremors, he began to detect increasing amounts of radon emission and on 27 March 2009 he took his findings to the authorities.
The mayor of one neighbouring town, Sulmona, was sufficiently impressed to dispatch public address vans warning residents of an impending quake. The panic that ensued was such that, on 30 March, scientists persuaded the local authorities to issue a legal injunction forbidding Giuliani, as an untrained amateur rather than a professional seismologist, to issue any further warnings.
On 31 March, after a 4.1 quake had shaken the city, the government’s Civil Protection Agency called a meeting at which scientists emphasised their opinion: that such swarms were not necessarily the precursors of major quakes, but acted instead as a discharge of energy, actually reducing the likelihood of catastrophe. On the basis of that opinion, the authorities called a press conference and issued a media statement, reassuring the city’s residents. As a result, many Aquilani, against prior training and instinct, remained indoors through the minor shocks — a 3, a 3.7 — that occurred in the evening a few hours before the quake struck.
Scientists have disputed the reliability of Giuliani’s findings, notably scientists from another seismically active area, California. They have also objected to the way in which Italian justice dealt with the exercise of professional expertise. In Italy, four scientists, two engineers and a government official were brought to trial, accused of issuing unsound advice in L’Aquila that led to the deaths of at least thirty individuals, and sentenced to four years in prison. (In a recent appeal trial, they have since been acquitted.) Also taken to court were the technicians who in 2000 had renovated the fatally fragile university dormitory constructed in the 1960s, possibly of inferior concrete. They also received a four-year prison sentence.
In Christchurch, professional responsibility and retribution have been handled differently. In 2012, a Royal Commission into the collapse of the CTV building found that the tower had been constructed initially to a ‘pioneering design’ with inadequate reinforcing, designed by an engineer inexperienced with structures of more than two storeys. He was working ‘beyond his competence’, without proper direction by the consulting company’s boss, Alan Reay.
Investigation by a determined journalist, Martin van Beynen, also revealed that the man who had supervised the building’s construction, Gerald Shirtcliff, was not a professionally qualified engineer but a fraud. He had assumed the identity of an English engineer named Will Fisher, whom he had met in South Africa in the 1960s. In this guise he gained graduate engineering qualifications before working on numerous major projects in Australia and New Zealand, including the CTV building. In 2005, he was convicted of fraud after falsifying GST returns to sell a business and served twenty months in prison. At the end of his sentence he returned to Australia, resumed his false
identity and continued working there as an engineer. He ‘declined to appear’ before the commission, though he has since appeared before the court in Queensland, pleading guilty to 146 charges relating to his false qualifications for which he received a fine of $500,000, plus $20,000 professional costs.
Following the September quake, the CTV building was twice inspected by engineers and judged to be safe before its fatal collapse in February 2011, but clearly there are doubts over its construction. Four years after the February quake, Shirtcliff and others connected to the construction of the building have yet to appear before a court in New Zealand, though a police spokesman has announced that charges of manslaughter and criminal nuisance are likely.
I listen to Francesco, who is certain his father remained in his home because of baseless reassurance. He stayed too, sleeping downstairs, and was saved only because two wardrobes fell at the same instant and formed an arch over his bed through which he was able to crawl. I think of the overgrown mess that for years covered the CTV site. I read the reports and watch the slow process of the law attending to responsibility and I am not sure which approach — draconian enforcement, grinding caution — is to be preferred.
ON THE CORSO, SOTTO I PORTICI, the council has erected a photographic display of the city’s major restoration projects, with black and white images of notable buildings and estimated costs of repair. One structure has already been repaired: the fontana with the ninety-nine spouts, the spring that symbolises the founding of the city. It suffered little damage and was the first structure to be restored, a priority within a few weeks of the quake, functioning once again as a symbol, this time of the city’s rebirth.
Here also is Santa Maria del Suffragio with her damaged cupola. It is to be restored in a style ‘compatible with historic tradition’ to ‘dimensions analogous to the original’. The cost for this work is projected to be €6,500,000, €3,250,000 of it donated by the government of France.
Here is the pilgrimage church of San Bernardino with its ruined belfry, cracked dome and fallen apse. Its repair is estimated at €36,000,000 and will take ten years.
Here is the Palazzo del Governo, which collapsed utterly and must be rebuilt at a cost of €45,000,000.
Here is the Teatro Comunale, a glorious confection dating from 1854, and base since 1963 for the Teatro Stabile. It is to be restored at a cost of €2,400,000.
The Ministry of Culture is undertaking to spend €150 million in the city. It will cost €50,000,000 to restore the castle, estimated completion time: eight years. €14,500,000 for the Duomo in the central square: to be finished in eleven years. €5,500,000 to repair the basilica of Santa Maria di Collemaggio. €25,000,000 to restore the provincial library. Some of the funding will come from the state, some from regional government, some from foreign governments and some from individual donation.
The photos stand under the arches. Forty notable buildings scheduled to be restored to their former glory. In all, around the city, 485 sites require repair, 10,000 buildings across the region. The total cost to restore L’Aquila — its homes and small businesses as well as its notable buildings — has been estimated to be around €12 billion. Around €8 billion has already been spent.
I stand making rough calculations. How does this bill stack up against Christchurch’s anchor projects, the $500 million convention centre, the $509 million rugby stadium, the $217 million sports hub, the $100 million river precinct with its London-style bars? Christchurch’s rebuild is slated to cost $40 billion. This little Italian city proposes restoring itself for the equivalent of $19 billion. What are we all getting for our money?
We meet up on the Corso with some of Francesco’s friends: Silvia who, like Francesco, was born and bred here, and her husband and two teenage daughters. They have recently returned to the city after four years in exile on the coast at Pescara, first in a hotel, then in a house belonging to relations. Silvia is an historian. For her, this has meant a 100 kilometre daily commute to teach at L’Aquila’s university. Her husband, too, has faced a long commute, while for her daughters, there have been new schools and all the challenges faced when you are eleven or thirteen and have had to move away abruptly from a place they describe, without any prompting whatever, as ‘the perfect city’.
And why was it perfect? Emily is the more talkative of the two. She describes a Sunday morning: church, then ice cream in the square, then walking to their grandmother’s for lunch. ‘You could walk everywhere and there was so much to do.’ She reaches for the perfection of simple routine and the possibilities for a child free to roam about in a compact, walkable city.
And now they are back, living in Silvia’s mother’s home, they are rehearsing a show at the youth theatre, they have met up again with all their friends. There’s a lot of drinking here, they say, and drugs and the daily reminder of destruction, but they are happy to be home again in their city, back at their old school.
It’s the same school Francesco attended, and Silvia too, though it has moved from its former inner-city site to the perimeter. It is, in the Italian system, a liceo classico.
ITALIAN HIGH SCHOOLS, IT SEEMS, have a very different format from the New Zealand equivalent. At fourteen, children choose a high school depending on their general aptitude and intentions in life: for the next five years, until graduation at nineteen, children with a scientific bent can choose to attend a liceo scientifico; if artistically inclined, a liceo where the curriculum is centred on art and design. If their intentions are law, technology or tourism, they can opt for an istituto tecnico. If engineering, agriculture, gastronomy or handicrafts, an istituto professionale. The oldest, the most traditional school, however, is the liceo classico, which has as its curriculum focus the humanities. Literature is at its core, along with philosophy, history and languages. Latin and Greek are compulsory subjects. These are all state schools. (Fewer than 10 per cent of Italian children attend private schools and those are generally run by religious organisations or international schools for the children of expats. Boarding schools are also rare: why would you send your children into the care of strangers?) All the different kinds of high school offer the final examination that permits entry to university.
It seems a million miles away from New Zealand where, since 2008, children in primary and secondary state and private schools can now be ‘Educated for Enterprise’, for example, via a programme sponsored by the Tindall Foundation, established by a man who made a fortune importing mass-produced goods and selling them in large warehouses across the country. According to the ‘E4E’ website, he had decided that a ‘new approach to learning was necessary’, because of ‘changes in society and the economy’, including the development of ‘fast capitalism — niche markets and the ability to rapidly change to meet/drive changing consumer needs and values.’ His solution was to introduce a programme for use in New Zealand schools. ‘An enterprising spirit’ would be incorporated into the standard curriculum. Resource lists supplied for teachers’ use on the website include units in which children can become ‘Bargain Hunters … Go on a class trip to a local second-hand clothing shop and purchase clothing for a themed party’. Or ‘Watch Horror Movie 101 and explore how characters demonstrate enterprising attributes’.
I wonder about the influence of a very different kind of education on the present situation in L’Aquila. The past shapes our conversation as we walk about the city. Francesco and Silvia refer to Celestine V and Margaret of Austria with the same easy familiarity that they mention contemporary politicians and filmmakers and artists or writers. Educated in the same system, the two teenagers accept without demur that the city must be restored. ‘We’re the generation who are going to have to restore it all,’ says Emily, and I wonder, listening to that, about those nebulous things, values and culture, and how they might condition us to respond when the walls cave in and the ceiling falls.
We pass the building that once housed the liceo classico on our way to visit the Palazzetto dei Nobili, one of the few build
ings in the city to have been completely restored. Their former school is sheathed in a web of scaffolding supporting every arch and architrave. In one archway a bunch of fresh flowers glows in the dark, alongside a photograph of a young man smiling, just as, at home, bunches of flowers were tied to those makeshift wire cordons round the CTV site. Sites are not easily cleared of those who have died. They stay on, and the flowers that remember them.
The Palazzetto is an exquisite little box of a building dating from the seventeenth century. It was where the men who ruled this city met and planned, beneath the carved wooden wings of a massive Habsburg eagle and surrounded by gilt-framed paintings of ecstatic humanity floating toward heaven.
The Habsburgs are long gone, victims of political change and the insistent cousin-to-cousin, uncle-to-niece inbreeding that left the last Spanish emperor, Charles III, unable to talk till he was four and unable to walk till he was eight. El Hechizado, the Bewitched, drooled constantly, failed to produce an heir and died at thirty-nine with, his doctor reported, ‘a heart the size of a peppercorn, corroded lungs, a gangrenous digestive tract and a single testicle black as coal’.
The Villa at the Edge of the Empire Page 19
