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Scars, as a rule, do not make human faces prettier but can make them more interesting. The same mechanism is at work in towns and cities.

Many modern cities with long histories bear the scars of old catastrophes in their townscapes: we can still see where the structure of London was altered following the Great Fire of 1666 and where the old streets were simply rebuilt with new houses.

We can still trace the route of the Berlin Wall through Germany’s capital, not least because East Germany’s Communist government insisted on destroying so much of the town’s urban fabric to secure the imposed border.

No matter how much pain these events may have caused at the time: once they have receded far enough into history’s back view mirror, they rarely fail to add an extra layer of interest.

One can guess how the victims of these catastrophes must have felt, but it is another thing entirely to step into the shoes of the people from the following generation.

What would London have felt like a few years after the Great Fire, when the old city had died and the new one had not yet emerged, when the wounds had barely healed and time had been too short for any scar tissue to grow?

"damage from earthquake in l'Aquila - Eagle with Broken Wings"

There are only a few places at any time in our lives that can give us this experience of the immediate aftermath. At the present time, one of these places is L’Aquila, the historic capital of the Abruzzo region in central Italy.

On 6 April 2009, L’Aquila was shattered by an earthquake strong enough to destroy if not to downright flatten much of the town’s urban fabric.

Today, there is still a L’Aquila, but it is no longer the same town:

L’Aquila, an eagle with broken wings

"L'Aquila - Eagle with Broken Wings"

Nearly 10 years after the earthquake, L’Aquila is still on life support. In London, four years after the Great Fire, half of the houses that had burnt down were already rebuilt.

Berlin’s Potsdamer Platz project – designed to recreate the town’s historic central square in an area that had been a death zone for 25 years – reached its first important milestone with the completion of the Mercedes Benz building in 1996, seven years after the fall of the Wall. The area was to remain Europe’s largest construction site for another decade.

In L’Aquila, meanwhile, while some activity seems to be going on, …

… many houses appear to exist in a limbo: they have been sufficiently secured against collapse, for the time being, but there are no signs of any attempt to bring them back to life.

"damaged house in l'Aquila - Eagle with Broken Wings"

Others still appear to have been totally abandoned. Some houses are in such a state that it is difficult to imagine that anybody will ever move back in. Some of these buildings are just empty shells.

Zombie houses …

…that fill out entire zombie streets.

"broken streets of l'Aquila - Eagle with Broken Wings"

Even L’Aquila’s central piazza has barely recovered from the quake, and the administrative buildings on the old high street – L’Aquila was and is a provincial capital – are still shut down.

"Administrative building of l'Aquila - Eagle with Broken Wings"

Will any of these ever reopen?

Up to a point, L’Aquila seems to be in denial. The scale of the preservation effort appears to express a belief in the town’s complete restoration, while its lack of urgency suggests that, quietly, everybody is just waiting for moment when the damaged urban fabric has decayed to the point where it crumbles and they can start afresh.

"damaged houses in L'Aquila - Eagle with Broken Wings"

This situation is a result of the quake as well as of government decisions. When the quake struck, after all, it destroyed not only churches and administration buildings but also residential homes: 20,000 people were made homeless in L’Aquila alone, alongside another 50,000 in the region.

At the time, this was the most pressing problem, and the Berlusconi government reacted by building “new towns” in and around L’Aquila.

Prefab homes, shops and churches where entire neighbourhoods and villages could be resettled within months while the reconstruction of the badly destroyed centre would have taken years.

Once the problem of rehousing the homeless had lost its urgency, L’Aquila inevitably slipped down the government’s list of priorities.

Meanwhile, a lot of money has flowed into the region, but not all of the billions of Euros were spent wisely.

Approximately €250 million were paid out for scaffolding alone. One reason why there a seems to be so much scaffolding is the commercial incentive of erecting it.

Clearly, on a building site on this scale, contractors could not be expected to negotiate every individual intervention with the municipal government, and some element of standardized pricing had to be introduced.

So it was determined that contractors could claim € 30 for every clamp, few questions asked. Guess what happened next.

"scaffolding in l'Aquila, Eagle with Broken Wings"

Walking around l’Aquila, the eagle with broken wings, is a strange, almost otherworldly experience.

The town, lest we forget, was once considered a gem with first-class architecture, and there are – despite the devastation – still many interesting things to see.

There’s the fortress (mentioned in last week’s post), the medieval Fountain of 99 Spouts …

"The Fountain of 99 Spouts of L'Aquila"

… and much else.

But the reminders of what happened on 6 April 2009 (and what has failed to happen since) are never far away.

They are impossible to escape, an ever-present ghost in the background. Having read the press before our visit, we had expected to find a damaged town, of course, but were still stunned to witness something on this scale.

Whatever you can say about a walk through the L’Aquila of 2018, it is an experience unlike any other.

"working on ruins in L'Aquila - Eagle with Broken Wings"

We hope you make the trip to visit L’Aquila, an eagle with broken wings!

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