Norcia is a purgatory. A city where everyone is waiting for the end of one penance inflicted due to a whim of the Earth, between endless construction sites, unfulfilled reconstruction promises and a mogia daily life among tents and prefabricated shacks around the walls of the historic center.
I compared my photographs with images dating back just four months before the earthquake, with an unusual use of Google Street View: time travel, in the moment before the disaster. Who would have imagined, in those days, to be seeing the city for the last time?
But let's get back to the present.
You understand that something is wrong when you arrive in front of theentrance of Norcia, which welcomes you on crutches: Porta Romana, in fact, is an arch completely covered by scaffolding, in turn loaded with signs and lists of all the commercial activities that have been moved outside the city walls, in the hope of to survive selling something to the last few visitors and residents who, stoically, remained in the city. Tourists have become a mirage: Italians are afraid to stay overnight and we rely above all on European visitors, who every evening stop in the only open bar, Benito, and make the city resonate in a foreign language.
At the foot of St. Benedict, the patron saint of Europe, she was sitting Giuseppina, one ninety-one year old lady who lives in a low without doors and windows behind the church, miraculously survived the collapses. Her neighbors went to Spoleto, while her childhood friend moved to Terni and now lives with her son's family. Thus, remained alone, the elderly lady spends the whole day sitting in the square a embroider caps and scarves that every month gives to associations involved in charitable projects.
“You guys should be happy“, He began with a speech in a marked Umbrian accent. "I have been working since I was in third grade and I still don't stop for a moment, but I'm happy. Today you have so many things and I no longer see smiling boys, when I was your age it was enough for me to play with the chickens in the fields“.
Then, between unrequited love stories and lives that no longer exist, there could not be missing war: “I wrote a poem about a soldier I met in '44. He was little more than a little boy, scared and hungry, but no one in the village wanted to welcome him because everyone thought he was a spy for the Germans. I took courage and invited him home: I was sure Mom would scold me. But instead she made him sit down at the table and gave him to eat, she looked after him like a son. Who knows if he's still alive!“.
But I cannot publish these verses, which are part of a whole collection of memories written in poetry. The lady was very clear: "I wrote them and I always carry them with me, but I don't want to publish anything. I recite them to anyone who meets me in this square". Even if it is now deserted.
Here the night is really dark and not in rhetorical terms, but because in most of the streets there is no public lighting. And the evacuated houses help to give the town a spooky atmosphere. Thus, leaving aside the main street and streets, some areas of the city seem to disappear from the world at night. At least until you return to the squares, where the public lighting is given by the gazebos of the few restaurants still in business, with dim yellow lights that illuminate the many banners hanging from the balconies, in which the inhabitants of Norcia accuse the government of having abandoned the city.
Yet there are so many young: one would expect a desert made up of elderly people and a few small entrepreneurs who have decided to stay in the city. But in these evenings before the winter season you can meet many teenagers left to chat under the statue of San Benedetto or gathered around an ice cream at Benito's, the only ice cream bar open in the evening inside the walls. The other open night shop is a small tobacconist's that survives in a plastic shed just outside the door into town.
Around the fractured walls of Norcia, however, are hidden couples who, in a scene with a slightly vintage taste, kiss in the half-light of the trees.
For those who live in the city love affairs among boys they are lived lightly and without shame to appear in public.
For a small community, however, things in the past were experienced with seriousness and scandal. The neighbor Castelluccio of Norcia tells well what happened to lovers (and especially to betrayals!) in the village: the name at night appeared on a "gossip wall“, Updated with all the messes of the village that dominates the immense flowery plateau which, not surprisingly, is called“ Piani di Castelluccio ”.
The wall has now become a epitaph discolored: entry into the country, which in 2015 barely mattered 121 inhabitants, is crossed out by a sign indicating it as "Red Zone". Behind you can only see the rubble of the old houses, with the signs overturned on the street and the houses torn apart by the earthquake while still displaying their furnishings, a bit like the carcass of an Earth prey pouring out its guts on the street.
Next to the town square, surrounded by houses that no longer exist, there is still an old sign that reads cynically like this: "Welcome to Castelluccio di Norcia, a European city“.
Here the night is not like in Norcia: there are no more lights. After sunset, the entire plateau devours Castelluccio with its darkness and, when winter comes, relegates to the past all the photographs that remember it as a snowy village full of lights, a bit like a small Santa Claus village in Umbrian sauce.
After the earthquake the city emptied itself and it is estimated that around thirty people remained. The village survived thanks not only to the very famous ones lentils, which are still today the dish offered by the last three restaurants open in the square, but also thanks to spring blossom festival, which illuminates the plateau in red and yellow: the entire plain is filled with flowers that stretch out for kilometers as far as the eye can see, starting from the small hill on which Castelluccio rises and reaching the foot of the mountains that separate the Umbria from the Marche.
Today "tourists are mostly foreigners“Explains a merchant of local products forced to survive in a sheet metal placed in front of the ruins of his shop. And goes on: "Italians often are frightened and they don't even want to stay overnight in Norcia. We now live thanks to passing customers, but it is very hard“.
The entire city economy is clinging to the "Hang gliding“, A set of steel and wood shacks inaugurated in 2018, created to temporarily house the commercial activities devastated by the earthquake. It actually turned out to be a kind of economic drip for a shrunken territory coma.
But the fear of the residents is that this intervention is one way in which the state is clean your conscience before deleting the communities of Central Italy from the political agenda, a bit like what happened with the famous houses of L'Aquila: the works in Norcia are proceeding slowly and in Castelluccio the rubble from the streets.
Report that do not let us hope in a rebirth rapid in the area, especially in a country where emergency solutions too often become definitive.
