From those 59 seconds rubble and rebirth

Before you start reading, count to 59. That's a lifetime, 59 seconds. Those in which the Orcolàt opened its jaws wide and swallowed men and women, houses and churches, a people and its culture. 6 May will be half a century since the 1976 earthquake: 990 dead, over 100,000 homeless and displaced, 18,000 homes destroyed, 75,000 damaged; 500 billion old lire was the first estimate of the damage, to which another 500 billion for businesses and 300 billion for public works should be added. In the end, the bill reached 4,500 billion lire for a model reconstruction, 'as it was and where it was', supported by the Civil Defence, born in that drama. But the healed wound still remains a scar. And it still burns, as demonstrated by the many books, exhibitions and docufilms (do not miss the one directed by Federico Savonitto with the voice of Bruno Pizzul) in recent weeks. To try and understand, here is the heart and reason, beating in Angelo Floramo's Indian Summer of '76 (Bottega Errante, pp. 242, €20) and in Faglia dentro. Cosa resta del 6 maggio 1976 by Walter Tomada (Biblioteca dell'Immagine, pp. 200, € 18).

The first, Nonino Prize 2024, was 10 years old and today he knows that 'this too has eaten the Orc, the landscape of my land. The physical one and that of memory. On 6 May, peasant civilisation began to die', but that child had a shaman, Aquila Bianca, his grandfather, to overcome the fright reflected in the eyes of adults and 'inside a frightening crater, but right in its centre, lived a small tribe of wild and brave Indians. It was the summer of 1976'. Thus, the novel is an engaging stream of consciousness, written in exactly one month (and the lines have the adamantine transparency of certain waters of the Tagliamento), such was the power of memories, between the house in San Daniele, the rubble and the rocks looming over Gemona. How hot that day, it's evening, reading time: "I'm about to turn the page and I feel the bed move under my ass. A rattling, it's the bison. And immediately, with a beastly force, a cry of earth and splitting stones comes up, at an incredible speed, from below. As if coming out of fearful depths. And everything begins to shake. A hand has grabbed the house and is trying to uproot it'. The reassuring words of Ljuba, the mother; the father going towards Gemona: "Everyone's dead. We left the car and went on foot. It was not possible to do otherwise. A white shroud stretched over Gemona, as if it had just snowed. I could feel the lime in my mouth and the dust was burning in my eyes. I was coughing and crying. The tremors continue, definitive ones in September to destroy everything but everything, tents arrive (even from Pakistan), and Angelo plays Indians with his friends, but everything is damn serious: 'How did Aquila Bianca repeat? One must celebrate life. Always. Even for those who didn't make it,' and today's Angel - because the story is a happy in-and-out of time - broods: 'maybe the Beast didn't just pluck out your body, but also gnawed away at your soul'.

The agricultural one from which Tomada's surgical analysis starts to recount a redemption that cannot be taken for granted. The conviction is that 'un modon par omp e il Friûl al torne a plomp' (one brick per person and Friuli gets back on track). Help arrived, Friulians rolled up their sleeves, the church, with figures such as pre Checo Placerean and other Glesie Furlane parish priests, guided the communities beyond the dismay and said with the bishop of Udine, Alfredo Battisti, 'first the factories, then the houses, and then the churches'. When the darkness seemed most terrible, in the tent cities, people thought about knowledge and 125,000 signatures were collected for the University of Udine, the only one to have been born out of popular urging, and become a reference in earthquake-proof engineering. And the question remains: 'for whom did the earthquake victims of that time rebuild Friuli? For themselves or for future generations? But if the fruit of certain efforts is presented today as a regalia, why should those young people feel that they belong to a greater history, made up of roots and values, and of a model rebirth, if no one passes them on to them any more?". The earthquake is the ante quem and the post quem of every Friulian, who recognises in that atrocious tremor the cement of an identity made up of centuries-old language and history.

"After 1976 Friulians made a difference by exploring original solutions often pushed from below, not conforming to decisions from above. The illusion of having become an example to be imitated hides a more bitter truth: after having taken the right road to get back on our feet, we may have gone astray because on the surface Friuli has risen, but deep down the wound still hurts. The day we stop telling ourselves that we are models and realise that we have partly betrayed our history, perhaps we will become a model again. For ourselves even more than for others. And that fault line inside will finally begin to close. Just as the wounds of Venzone, Friuli's medieval heart, rebuilt stone by stone, numbering them one by one, from the cathedral to the walls, where walking returns those 59 seconds, perhaps with the verses of Pierluigi Cappello, Friuli's most excruciating 20th-century poet: "Outside there is too little sky to say tomorrow / to say what we have been / and the sun shines on the motorway / and on the rush of cars / when one opens the door and enters to look / as if time had been watching him all along" (In bar, in Chiusaforte, 2002). The Orcolàt has been watching us forever, we Friulians know this.

THE PHOTO EXHIBITION IN SPILIMBERGO (PORDENONE)