MICHAEL KIMMELMAN ESSAY


L’AQUILA, Italy - Cities take centuries to grow, but they can die in the relative blink of an eye. After an earthquake in April killed hundreds and left tens of thousands homeless in and around this medieval and Baroque city some 110 kilometers northeast of Rome, the emergency relief efforts were extraordinary. Volunteers from all over Italy rushed to help , and construction workers were soon erecting dozens of housing complexes on the outskirts of town.

But now, the longer-term future of L’Aquila is in question. Shortages of money, political will, architectural good sense and international attention - along with a distinctly Italian predilection for a kind of magical thinking - threaten to finish what the quake started.

Efforts are being made to save the roughly 110,000 monuments and artifacts the culture ministry estimates were affected in the quake. But ministry officials guess that it will take 10 or 15 years to return the city’s historic center to normal, and nearly all rebuilding, including of private houses, will meanwhile have to get approval from the ministry, a painstaking process.

Before the earthquake about 10,000 people lived in the city center, and another 60,000 nearby. After a decade or more of being displaced, those who once lived in the heart of L’Aquila may no longer be around or want to return, and the housing built for them in the surrounding industrialized area may have changed the area beyond recognition.

A gracious medieval city onto which a Baroque one had been precariously balanced (the precariousness partly accounted for the extent of damage during the quake), L’Aquila was also a commercial and cultural hub, a university town. In a few years, if the center remains dead, it could devolve into nothing more than a second-tier tourist site in the midst of undifferentiated sprawl.

Any recovery, especially a speedier one, depends on billions of dollars (at least $16 billion, by various estimates) coming mostly through the Italian Parliament. Lately even a small excise tax to aid recovery, proposed by the mayor of L’Aquila and various culture officials, went nowhere.

In a country pressed for cash , the success of the emergency efforts has paradoxically fed the impression that L’Aquila no longer needs urgent help. As Michela Santoro, an assistant to the mayor, Massimo Cialente, put it : “The message in the media here is, ‘Things are going well.’ That is far from the truth.”

“If we don’t reconstruct properly,” Mr. Cialente said - meaning, from his perspective, to put everything back exactly as it was, albeit seismically secured - “it will be a shame on the entire nation. We will have another Pompeii.”

That’s a typical lament here. Italians often think they must restore the past or end up consigned to it. Alternatives are hard to imagine.

What’s the solution? Even while bombs were falling on London during the Blitz in 1940, British planners were conjuring up visions of a new postwar London. Calamity became an opportunity to dream.

Here, in the absence of a strong, guiding leadership, strong urban planning laws or public forums where citizens might seriously consider a future L’Aquila, there is only the sense that opportunity may be slipping away. But opportunity still exists, perhaps to embrace new architecture alongside old, as L’Aquila did after the earthquake in 1703, when the city became the beloved Baroque one everyone now wants to preserve as if it had always been there. Never a perfect city but a real, living one, L’Aquila might yet become the model for a new sort of 21st century historic center in Italy.

Roberta Pilolli works for L’Aquila’s music conservatory. The school’s new quarters, an $8 million metal-andglass building , was built in just over a month and officially opened in December. “I want my home back exactly as it was,” Ms. Pilolli said, talking about her small, prewar terrace house in the city center, where her family lived for ages .

Pier Luigi Cervellati, an urban planning professor in Venice, said recovery should focus on returning residents to the center more quickly, not on providing alternative housing, monuments or malls . “A center that is left empty for years dies,” he said. “These new homes they’re building on the outskirts are very expensive and make no urban sense. They’re like terminals at an airport. They have no soul. The risk is that the center will become a nonplace.”


A devastating earthquake has presented a challenge and an opportunity for L’Aquila, Italy. The quake reduced the Church of Santa Maria Paganica to a roofless ruin. / CHRIS WARDE-JONES FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES