In July 1883 the philosopher Benedetto Croce was vacationing with his family in Casamicciola, Ischia. A boy of seventeen at the time, he was getting ready to have supper with his mother, father and sister, and was about to take his place at the table. All of a sudden he saw his father sway, as if weightless, and immediately drop to the floor, while his sister shot up to the ceiling. Terrified, he looked around for his mother and joined her on the balcony, from which they fell together. He lost consciousness and was buried up to his neck in the rubble. For many hours his father spoke to him, before passing away. He told him: ‘Offer a hundred thousand liras to whoever saves you.’ Benedetto would be the sole survivor of his family killed by the earthquake.

The annals of earthquakes are part of Italy’s history. There is no family that does not recall experiencing one directly or indirectly. I have my mother’s stories about the Irpinia earthquake of 1980. I was one year old, and my mother often recalls the nights spent in the car, feeding me nothing but mashed fruit. For Italians, earthquakes are not an unfamiliar occurrence. Yet, whenever there is one, it always seems to be the first, it seems like the first time we’re experiencing such a tragedy. Each time we have the feeling that we are unprepared, or so it seems, given what happened in L’Aquila.

Since the 1990s, L’Aquila had successfully accomplished a miracle: it had become a university town. Like Urbino and other towns in central Italy, it had managed to become a veritable citadel of learning. These towns are the Italian version of American college campuses, or, better yet, they are more attractive than college campuses because they are places that already seem naturally predisposed to becoming communities. Young blood flows into these towns and radically transforms them: the evenings stretch out, the streets are more crowded, rents increase, life begins to adapt to the typical rhythms of a youthful district, full of students from different parts of Italy and from abroad.

In L’Aquila there is a building that is very well known: the Casa dello Studente, students’ residence. One hundred and twenty students from out of town live there, in fifty rooms. Dating from the mid-1960s, the building is seven stories high. It is a dormitory that is lived in all day, complete with dining hall, computer room, administrative offices. To live there you have to win a scholarship, then do well in your exams, uphold a high average – in short, you have to earn a bed in the residence at Via XX Settembre 46.