It was 5:20 in the morning on a Monday 28 December 1908, exactly 111 years ago, when an earthquake of magnitude 7.1 hit the area of Messina and Reggio Calabria. It was one of the most disastrous seismic events of the entire twentieth century and caused the death of over 100 thousand people. No other natural disaster has ever claimed more lives in European history.
The destructive power of the earthquake was amplified by the time the earth began to move: hundreds of thousands of people were caught in sleep, at home, in their own bed, and they didn't even have time to react.
Infrastructures and communication routes, already precarious in the south at the beginning of the century, were suddenly interrupted: bad roads, collapsed bridges, unusable railways. Farewell also to telegraph and telephone, as well as gas and electricity. Naturally, all this hindered the rescue operations, which even without these further impediments would have been far inadequate to deal with such a vast catastrophe.
The earthquake (or an underwater landslide, according to more recent reconstructions) also caused a tidal wave and the combined effect of the two events was most devastating Messina, where almost 90% of the buildings could not withstand the impact and collapsed.
But the situation was also tragic at Reggio Calabria. “The descriptions in the newspapers are below the truth – said the socialist politician Pietro Mancini – No word, the most exaggerated, can give you the idea. You must have seen. Imagine all that can be saddest, most desolate. Imagine a completely demolished city, stunned people in the streets, rotting corpses on every street corner, and you will have an approximate idea of what Reggio is, the beautiful city it was”.
The phase of reconstruction it was the object of violent criticism for the slowness of the works and because the new houses were built like the previous ones, without any anti-seismic precautions. Despite this, in many cases the heirs of the survivors were forced to live in the barracks for decades.
