Member-only story
A Ghost Tale
A love story that didn’t work, in a town that crumbled down
Have you ever lost a place? A home? A whole town?
Have you ever lived in a city that has been torn apart?
I have. Twice.
At 19, while my friends moved to big cities and embarked on the adventurous, alcoholic, exciting endeavor that is the first year at the university — the first year of unsupervised adult life —I packed my bags and moved to L’Aquila. The ghost town.
The city that had crumbled down just one year before, in the middle of a damned Spring night.
That night I had woken up at half past three, like everyone else in my town.
I had felt a lot of earthquakes, but none so strong. It was as if the air itself was ripped open.
Three hundred and nine people lost their lives that night, in L’Aquila and the nearby towns, two hours away from where I lived with my parents. Some of them were students — the university dorms collapsed on them like a house of cards.
Their faces in the newspapers, their mothers’ cries, the aftershocks that kept hitting for weeks.
Then would come the candlelight processions, the accusations, the lawsuits, the responsibilities, the politicians with helmets on. The…
