Forty Years On

Calabritto non c’è più. Calabritto is no longer there.

I was woken suddenly from my sleep by my mother holding me tight, grabbing at my shoulders, sobbing out those words. It had been an odd night, I was conscious of movement around me, the muffled sounds of strange voices through the walls of our flat. It was still dark when she came to tell me, I was confused and the desperation in her voice made me cry too. I couldn’t fathom what she was saying, it made no sense.

At 7.34pm on the evening of 23^rd November 1980 an earthquake of magnitude 6.9 had its epicentre in the Irpinia region of Campania, in southern Italy. Mainly a collection of small villages, linked by winding roads through lush, forested land largely untouched by modern development. Sitting on its hill, at the foot of its mountains, was Calabritto. The place my parents had grown up and left, the place where my grandparents still lived, where we went every summer, where we had documented family roots back to the 1400s.

The centuries-old buildings provided the doorways and archways that I played and hid in with my band of friends, a small girl running free through the labyrinth of stone-stepped passageways, dodging donkeys loaded with cargo and women balancing huge baskets of produce on their heads. She followed the statues being processed on feast days and waited outside the churches with the other children to swoop on the coins and sweets thrown at the summer brides. Her grandmother’s house, built onto the side of the ornate parish church, sat beneath the bell tower that sounded out the pace of the long summer days and sparkling nights playing in the squares lined with bars where a multitude of relatives argued over who was going to buy the bambina her gelato.  It was a million miles away from her life in the heart of London. It was her idyll and the sacred centre of her family’s universe.

Calabritto was no longer there.

Late into the night of the earthquake, my parents received a call from a family friend telling them the news. The voices I had heard were from the Italian radio station my brother had managed to tune into on our recently purchased stereo system. He and my parents had stood and listened as the list of affected villages was announced by the news reader. The first reports were of blocked roads and scenes of devastation. Finally, after hours of held breath, they heard the word they didn’t want to hear. Calabritto. I was woken up.

The next day, my parents and fellow emigrants from the village waited for news of parents, siblings, relatives and friends. They started to book flights to Naples to see it all with their own eyes, to do something, anything. By the evening, we had word that my mother’s parents had made it to safety and were being helped to get to my aunt, across the region in Amalfi. They had the clothes they stood in. No word or sighting of my father’s mother, my Nonna Rosa. The bell tower had crumbled, the debris around the church was insurmountable. A powerful aftershock in the early hours of the morning after the earthquake had caused more devastation and blocked off her neighbourhood even more, claiming the lives of those who had desperately gone in to rescue others with their bare hands. On the 25^th, Dad left to fetch her.

I can’t imagine what he saw, I can’t bear to think of what he went through, waiting each day to see who had been rescued from the rubble in sub-zero temperatures and which corpses were laid out for identification and the pile of coffins stacked up by the school buildings. I won’t ever know, because he has never spoken about it. When I see the news footage now, I weep at the desperation of it all, the wailing, the grief, the traumatised and exhausted rescue workers, the desolation. After two weeks, he was told to go home.

I remember vividly opening the door to Dad when he came back. I didn’t know what to say and his hug felt weak. My Dad, the singing, dancing, happy-go-lucky man about town who loved nothing more than a laugh with his friends and being silly with his family, who bought Mum ‘Baci’ chocolates from the Italian deli every Friday evening on his way home from work, who did amazing football tricks in the park. That version of Dad was gone. His joy of life went and took years to slowly trickle back. I never heard him sing again, never saw him dance or revel in silliness with that spark in his eyes until his grandchildren were born three decades later.

My grandmother’s body was recovered on the 22^nd December.

The decision was made to raze the village to the ground. It was rebuilt, eventually. There were many years of those who remained living in prefab homes. Many more had dispersed around the world, to live with family who had left years earlier. Some returned, some didn’t. We used to still go back every summer, crammed into a hot hut-like prefab, alongside so many others who needed and craved the touchstone of the village, their friends and relatives. They came from Europe and the Americas to a void that had to be filled with their optimism and memories, stubbornly holding onto a sense of place. To abandon it would make it all go away forever.

The processions still took place, the feast days were kept, August weddings happened, the children were born, life went on. As the new houses, streets and squares were completed, everyone took their new places and superimposed generations of tradition and habit onto this new scenery. Their children and grandchildren in turn take it onwards into the future, against the backdrop of the myriad challenges that the region still faces.  My parents and many of their friends moved back on retirement, to the fresh air, clean water and green hills, and we all return, frequently, to our roots. Our son knows the streets and our relatives still argue over who will buy the bambino the gelato from the bar in the piazza.

Today, forty years on, Calabritto is still there.

Dedicated to Nonna Rosa.

One of the 100 victims of the earthquake in Calabritto and of the 2,914 who died; 8,850 injured and 250,000 made homeless across the region.