ITALY: Italy continued to mourn its dead yesterday on a day marked by a funeral service for the 29 people, including 26 small children, killed in Thursday's earthquake in the small Molise village of San Giuliano di Puglia. More than 3,000 people, including state President Carlo Azeglio Ciampi and parents and relatives of the victims, attended yesterday's outdoor funeral mass held beside the village sports centre which since Thursday has also served as a morgue.
Rows of little white coffins, submerged in a sea of mainly white flowers and bedecked with favourite teddy bears, photos and messages from distraught parents, dominated the improvised church-cum-tent for a service presided over by San Giuliano parish priest, Don Ulisse, and six local bishops.
Rescue workers, still wearing their helmets and work clothes, were amongst the mourners whilst ambulances were on hand lest the village experience yet another of the after-shock tremors that have rocked it since the quake that struck at 11.32 a.m. on Thursday, causing the fatal collapse of the village schoolhouse. Twenty-six children, aged three to 10, and one teacher died in the schoolhouse, whilst two other women died in separate incidents.
Yesterday's service witnessed more of the anguish of the last three days as distraught parents cried out the names of their lost little ones while their coffins were carried off to the village cemetry.
Towards the end of the service many in the congregation began to weep when one of the bereaved mothers, Mrs Nunziatina Porrazzo, mother of Luigi, spoke from the altar, saying: "In the name of all you bereaved mothers and fathers, we entrust our little angels to the Lord, the angels of San Giuliano. They are close to us now and we are lucky that we have their faces beside us. I would just like to ask one thing of everyone. Please ensure that our schools be made more safe, I don't ever want another mother or father to have to grieve like this."
Tears also flowed when a brief letter written by three of the children who survived the trajedy was read out by Don Ulisse: "It was a terrible moment, just one instant that has separated us for ever. You'll always be in our hearts and we'll never ever forget you. Ciao."
Speaking after he had visited some of the earthquake survivors in hospital in Larino, near San Giuliano, shortly after the funeral service, state President Ciampi probably spoke for many of his countrymen when saying: "The thing that we all felt today during the funerals of those poor children was the sensation that we adults, we parents, we have not been able to protect our children".
Even as the funeral service was taking place in San Giuliano di Puglia, a cabinet meeting in Rome was setting aside €50 million worth of reconstruction funds intended for the 16 villages and 22 townlands worst hit by the Molise earthquake.
As of yesterday, more than 5,500 people have been left homeless since not only has the entire village of San Giuliano been evacuated for safety reasons but also because many of the dwellings in surrounding villages have been deemed uninhabitable until they can be checked.
Predictably, too, the weekend was marked by the inevitable opening of a judicial inquiry into the tragedy, an inquiry led by magistrate Andrea Cataldi Tassoni, from the Larino public prosecutor's office. Speaking to reporters on Saturday, Ms Cataldi Tassoni said that the schoolhouse disaster was "an anomalous collapse".
The judicial investigation will have to address at least two fundamental questions. Firstly, did renovation work on the school, completed last year and involving the addition of an extra storey for a school computer room, determine the collapse?
Secondly, why were San Giuliano and many other villages in the lower Molise region not classified as "zones at seismic risk"?