ITALY WAS yesterday trying to come to terms with a dramatic and tragic weekend marked by a serious earthquake in the Emilia Romagna region and by a bomb blast outside a school in the port of Brindisi.
Seven people died, more than 50 were injured and approximately 5,000 were left homeless as a result of Sunday’s earthquake, while a 16-year-old girl, Melissa Bassi, was killed in Saturday’s bomb attack outside a school in Brindisi.
With the area around the epicentre of the earthquake still experiencing after-tremors yesterday, many people were preparing to spend a second night either in their cars or in small “tented villages” erected by the civil protection force.
Even though the damage to many homes was relatively minor, the continuing series of aftershocks has resulted in cautions against sleeping under their own roofs.
As engineers and technicians yesterday assessed the earthquake’s impact, the extent of the damage not only to agriculture and industry but also to the region’s cultural patrimony began to emerge.
While the earthquake’s centre was 50km north of Bologna, its effects were felt in Mantua in Lombardy, where the city’s symbolic building, the Palazzo Ducale, suffered severe damage.
An unexpected victim was the area’s famous parmeggiano or parmesan cheese.
The Italian Farmers’ Association, Coldiretti, said that as many as 400,000 of the huge, round cheeses had been badly damaged, at an estimated cost of €200 million.
The process of parmeggiano-making requires the huge cheeses to be stacked in “airing” sheds where they mature, but many of these buildings were so badly shaken by the quake that the shelves collapsed, sending the precious cheeses crashing to the floor.
Italian prime minister Mario Monti will preside over a cabinet meeting this morning where he will declare a state of emergency in the Emilia Romagna region.
As he addresses the complex problem of earthquake relief funds, experts will be closely monitoring the government’s decisions, bearing in mind that three years after the L’Aquila quake in which 300 people died in April 2009, the medieval centre of the town is still largely uninhabited and in ruins.
Mr Monti yesterday flew back early to Italy from the Nato summit in Chicago to attend the funeral of Ms Bassi, the schoolgirl blown up outside the Morvillo Falcone school in Brindisi last Saturday morning.
The prime minister’s s presence at the funeral in the girl’s home town of Mesagne, a town closely associated with the local Mafia, the Sacra Corona Unita, was indicative of how seriously his government views the implications of this terrorist-style attack in the current delicate economic climate.
Investigators continue to believe that the bomb was not the work of organised crime or of a terrorist organisation but rather of a single, possibly disturbed individual.
Last night two suspects, one a former soldier allegedly skilled in electronic devices, were being questioned by the Brindisi police.