Investigations carried out by the Prosecutor’s Office in L’Aquila into the tragic collapses involve around two hundred buildings. Among them is San Salvatore Hospital, inaugurated in 2000, which was never even opened because it failed to obtain a safety certificate. Until 6 April 2009 the hospital didn’t even appear on the property maps; as far as the state was concerned, the property did not exist. Construction had begun in 1972, but the work continually met with difficulty. In 1980, the same year as the earthquake in Irpinia, they were still working on the left side of the foundation. Following the earthquake, one of the labourers who had worked on the site, Pino, now nearly seventy years old, recalled how the hospital had been built: ‘That concrete was water. On one side San Salvatore has pillars of sand.’ Pino remembers reporting it to the unions, but a week later a union rep advised him to keep his mouth shut. During the earthquake an entire wing of San Salvatore Hospital collapsed and a large section of the building remained unfit for use.

Marco, Luciana, Angela, Francesco, Alessio, Davide, Michelone and Luca are not only victims of the earthquake, but also of human irresponsibility. Their tragedy is everyone’s tragedy. In One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez writes that ‘A person does not belong to a place until there is someone dead under the ground.’ If you scroll through the names of children who lost their lives in the L’Aquila earthquake, it is immediately evident that a number of them are foreigners: 22 out of 308 victims. Antonio Ioavan Ghiroceanu is the youngest victim of the Abruzzo earthquake. He wasn’t even five months old. Born in Italy, he was the son of Darinca and Laurentiu, a Romanian couple from Saint Demetrius. Children of Albanians, Romanians, Ukrainians, Moldavians who had come to Italy, to Abruzzo, seeking work and a better future. Marta and Ondreiy, aged sixteen and seventeen, had come to L’Aquila from the Czech Republic as a result of a travel award. They had been chosen as the best students at the Technical Institute of Pardubice, 90 kilometres from Prague.

When you die together it means you’ve lived together. Osmai Madi, a Macedonian mason, forty-two years old, lived in Poggio Picenze with his family. The earthquake caused his house to collapse. Osmai was able to save his wife and one daughter, but lost his other daughter, Valbona. In spite of that, realizing there was nothing more he could do for her, he went on to dig for others with his bare hands, to pull others out of the rubble. He saved eleven people of seven different nationalities.