Anecdotes

After walking through the devastated historic center of Tempera escorted by a firefighter, we saw a man and a woman who were anxiously looking at the fallen buildings. We started talking and asking about the earthquake, and whether their house was affected. We were told that their house was fine, but that the woman’s parents’ house was in the historic center and had been destroyed. After feeling a foreshock at 2 a.m., they called their daughter, whose house was outside the historic center, to come pick them up, since they didn’t feel very safe. That phone call probably saved their lives; their house was destroyed when the earthquake hit at 3:32 a.m.

Figure 1. Clock from Tempera church, which stopped at the time of the earthquake.

The historic center of San Gregorio was also devastated, with the church and most historic buildings completely destroyed. When walking through what was once the small historic center, we encountered a man on a tractor who was rifling through the debris and gathering what he could. We soon found out that his elderly father had lived in what was now a pile of rubble; when the earthquake hit, the man and his brother, whose house was a few hundred meters away, immediately ran to the wreckage and were able to save their father. He then insisted that we take a picture of him with one of his finds, and he brought his prized find from the back of the tractor: a fully cured prosciutto covered in dust. Peeking out from the tractor were two other prosciuttos, a dozen bottles of homemade wine, and a huge jar of dried cherries, all of which were salvaged from the rubble.

Figure 2. As he drove away in his tractor, he yelled, “We know what we’re eating tonight!”