The fact that the Casa dello Studente was not a safe structure was not just an idea of the students who watched the cracks widen and the columns rot away. It had also been put in writing. In 2006 the firm Collabora Engineering, which later became Abruzzo Engineering, had conducted a study on the buildings in the Abruzzo region at the request of the Regional Government and the Civil Protection agency; the Casa dello Studente on Via XX Settembre had been included among the 135 buildings categorized as having ‘critical structural issues’. It would have cost 1,470,000 euros to structurally modify the student residence to comply with standards, a ton of money to make all 135 buildings safe. Nevertheless, the students’ complaints went unheard, and their fears were met repeatedly with reassurances.

Even the National Major Risks Commission, which convenes in L’Aquila on 31 March, six days before the earthquake, prefers not to create alarm. Present at the meeting are members of Civil Protection, volcanologists and physicists, and all in all to them the situation appears normal.

In the face of such facts you begin to realize how critical it is to do things properly, how important it is to comply with the rules. Only with the devastation caused by the tragedy do you really understand that if the rules had been complied with, if the people who constructed the building had been given the opportunity to do things correctly, perhaps that building might not have become a grave for so many young people. Only when tragedy strikes, a catastrophe, do we really understand that the rules are by no means intended to constrain business, to create hurdles for companies, but rather they are a way of protecting life, of creating peace of mind, of affording everyone the chance to live without worry. The story of the Casa dello Studente, on the other hand, is symbolic of the criminal conduct, widespread in our country, of those who have built parts of the city with substandard concrete, saving on the cost of building materials, without regard for the fact that people made of flesh and blood would go to live in those ‘time bombs’.

On 6 April 2009 entire buildings, even newer ones, collapsed in just a few seconds: they literally crumbled. Entire buildings reduced to a pile of rubble due to an earthquake of medium intensity, which elsewhere would probably not have caused the same ruin. Suffice it to say that the Nuova Casa dello Studente, the new student housing in a Jesuit building dating back to the seventeenth century, and therefore certainly not built according to modern seismic criteria, remained standing. The Casa dello Studente on Via XX Settembre was built in the 1960s, in the twentieth century!