How similar is the recent earthquake in Abruzzo, Italy, to the one that Silone survived as a boy?
Unfortunately, it seems that history is repeating itself in that part of the world. I think there were too many parallels, including that there were some advance warnings of this. And now I’m seeing in the Italian newspapers that there’s concern about organized crime taking advantage of the reconstruction process, which is something Silone wrote about in 1915. How did surviving that earthquake shape Silone’s life? He was 14 years old; his father had died a few years earlier, and five of his six siblings had died, so the only people alive in his immediate family were his mother and his younger brother. The earthquake destroyed their home. His mother died and he ended up having to dig her out himself; the brother survived and was eventually rescued five days later. It was the middle of winter, a particularly difficult winter with heavy snows, and the wolves on the mountains in Abruzzo, in conditions like this, would come down into the towns because they smelled the sheep. With the earthq
