Friuli lost, Friuli found
The reconstruction after the earthquake of 1976.
Retracing the municipalities affected by the earthquake it is difficult to recognize signs of the events that in 1976 shook the Friuli area. Houses have been restored and roads reactivated. Castles, bell towers, churches, historic villas are almost entirely reconstructed so preserving the memory of the previous spatial order. Rare wooden prefabricated buildings grouped in makeshift-provisory villages testify at the edge of the towns an emergency moment.
Phases and organicity of operations within which this episode of settlement can be placed have been widely pondered and evaluated. The analysis of the motives and the social forces that supported and they scanned the moment of the reconstruction becomes from this point of view otherwise problematic. The first and most serious doubt concerns the possibility of resolving in the present day with the same resources a disaster of equal proportions. The profound changes that have affected the region does not allow optimism. The disconnection of social values and the disorientation of the individuals are dimly perceived as a tragedy which is taking place without any cultural development and political able to fully understand and interpret them. Reflecting upon the intelligence and energy that allowed to heal the society-territory fracture caused by the quake could mark a first step in understanding the challenges that events like the fall of the Berlin Wall, the adoption of the euro, the impact of information technologies and the globalized economy have proposed us in the following decades. In the moment which this perspective has been accepted, the reconstruction is no longer a tale to tell to grandchildren, but critical investigation which, if it is to admit the uncertainty of values and forces that animated the recovery, however, requires to resist the process of deconcentration which the region is subjected. The failure of the Carnica Co-operative Society - to cite just one example - is a serious symptom of social malaise-illness due to the economic downturn and the weak protests that resulted from it. They would in fact appear cracked social cohesion and the collective energies that animated reconstruction. Hence the urgent need to re-examine the forces that made the reaction to the 1976 catastrophe possible.
Provisional villages
Slums still present in the area hit by the earthquake may help us to mark the times and ways of the reconstruction. The cabins are found - even though most of them have been dismantled by authority - in most villages and hamlets of our mountain. As topographic traces reveal the wideness-magnitude of the disaster, they attest the loyalty and proximity to traditional communities, suggest the rationality of the plan according to which the process of rebirth was conducted.
In fact 350 provisional villages since 1977 housed 70,000 homeless people in 21,000 housing which covered a total area of 780,000 square meters.
To choose the land on which to build the huts was a complex undertaking, because the owners were numerous, sometimes untraceable as they emigrated, often unwilling to expropriation. In addition, there were no laws that allowed to requisition in times of emergency the necessary inauguration provisional spaces. The interventions of the Special Commissioner, the protagonist of the first phase of reconstruction, solved cases that some mayors had faced without success. From this moment communities, provinces, Region acted as the joints of a single entity controlled by the public opinion that had become as responsible of every choice as them.
Decentralization was in fact the key policy of success because it ordered to listen to the needs and to incorporate the ideas of those who had suffered the catastrophe. Slogans like "from the tents to the houses", "fasin di bessoi", expressed - with little realism - a stubborn determination to reborn, the rejection of all passiveness. Transforming this determination into viable projects became the main task for the mayors of each country with the coordination of the Region, to which the national government had recognized unprecedented independence.The decision to entrust the task of rebuilding the Friuli Region stricken by the earthquake cannot be underestimated in any way. It can be said that it applied for the first time with unexpected energy the rules of a Cattaneo federalism. The comparison between institutions and society was open and continuous because the Region entrusted responsibilities and tasks of reconstruction to local authorities that they were always in touch with the victims.
The choice and consent to repair the prevalent number of damaged houses and to rebuild those destroyed as where and how they were before, depended not only on the obvious basic needs, but on the will to overcome the condition of the region as "depressed" that in the last years they had already started and that the earthquake could stop. This time - unlike what happened in the First and Second World War - was recognized that autonomy which - it must be said - since the Revival the Friuli repeatedly had urged. The consciousness of identity promoted the idea of maintaining the original characters of the community and to satisfy the economic transformation underway.
The temporary doubling of the villages - provisional and final village - also favored the times of reconstruction, because owners remade the houses by themselves, because the radical transformation of the settlements was accompanied by common choices.
After emphasizing the political decision - matured in Rome – which began the revival of the earthquake zone, it should be recognized the role of the Region at a time when the mayors and municipalities dominated by too difficult tasks it offered technical aid as a support for the daily operations.
Decentralisation made each component of reconstruction active and responsible. Friuli in other words affirmated itself as a region with a distinct identity, not as the periphery of a centralized state. So each resolution respected the will of the individual in a real democratic progress dimension.
Temporary villages and new housing
Provisional villages corresponded to practical needs, but - at the same time – met emotional impulses and respected deep cultural values. The refusal to alienate at one's native country, to detach the identity that places and lifestyles had cemented, was a motivation that it agreed with the need to keep in place the necessary workforce to rebuild their houses and to resume the production activities.
The quality of the prefabricated, their tidy placement - forty years after the earthquake - show the rationality of the plan according to which have been chosen and placed. The renewed countries reveal in comparison a sort of anarchy. Every family has built on his own project, according to a personal idea of well-being and modernity. The homogeneity of the tradition, celebrated by decades of research on the "country house", has been deleted.
The emergence of the one-family villa underlines two facts: householders were the actors of the reconstruction; individual energies allowed to reactivate settlements that in its original form would not meet the modern needs of life.
In order to understand the birth of villages that insist on areas of tradition but which do not share features and functions, it should go over the plan according to which they have been set and the process that has made them possible.
To redo a home damaged or destroyed by the earthquake householders presented to the mayor, chief official of the Region, a project. This had to be approved by the technicians of the General Secretariat, which according to simple and clear rules approved repairs and renovations. If individuals were wanted to expand housing sizes exceeding the limits, they would face from their own pockets additional costs while resorting to subsidized loans.
Understanding better the time, it should remember that many inhabitants of the areas hitted by the earthquake were familiar with building techniques; that the rules of the building were less restrictive than nowadays. The commitment of the individuals which undoubtedly accelerated the timing of reconstruction could be summed up in iconic form by the cement mixer that - if not exactly common, but certainly significant - was launched in earthquake areas after factory hours. The proximity between temporary and permanent villages, between temporary villages and industrial companies maintained the commitment of the reconstruction of houses and factories, clutched in their development goals which could not be splitted. The abolition of the rural building that usually accompanied the house, in fact signs the end of traditional agriculture as the integration of the work abroad or at home.
A story that could be based on topographic traces of the event, it must neglect the uncertainties and anxieties of the period because it favors the last of the recovery aspect. While the sight can imply the intervention of the political groups and opinion, can not recall the conditions of housing backwardness that characterized most of the damaged municipalities. For many new homes radically changed the way of life, they represented a milestone of unexpected wellbeing. The benefit was extended even to those who had emigrated and now residing permanently abroad. They were offered the opportunity to establish itself as second home owners in the very place from which they had departed leaving poor walls abandoned. Cars with French license plate that - for example - were concentrated in Forgaria in summer Eighties are emblematic in this regard.
General overdimensioning of the reconstruction depends on the social complexity of the forces. The width of the financial resources resolved conflicts that the different needs of political parties and public opinion had and would advance. The tensions that citizens with fewer resources and supporters of the cultural values of the village could generate were generated by granting to all the possibility of repair or reconstruction of the earthquake-affected homes.
The timing of reconstruction
The contrast between the historical town of Gemona and the one that exceeds the limit of Pontebbana railroad and breaks into the plain, is repeated in the case of Venzone whose inhabitants have settled in and outside the walls. It's obvious the diversity between the ancient philological reconstruction of the city, realized through a strict detailed urban planning, and the heterogeneous periphery. As the fact is recurring – yet with variants that individual locations have suggested - it is necessary to recall the tragicalness of everyday life and the convulsive stages of post-earthquake, so to imagine how the complex of individual construction projects, which were directly authorized, have preceded the next, more orderly and pondered over, planned urban developments.
The distinction – still nowadays immediately evident - has its origin mainly in the different ways in which the demand of the earthquake victims has been imposed and satisfied.
In 1976 the industrial buildings that dominated the Osoppo field and the last moraine hills indicated the innovative advances that the Friulian economy had achieved and that that seismic events of May called into question. The Snaidero kitchens factory, which held the earthquakes remaining virtually intact - had to urgently find accommodation for its workers. The Fantoni furniture factory instead - severely damaged by the earthquake - had decided without delay the repair and upgrading of productive activity in situ. The same attitude has carried on by the Pittini steel factory, who was far less damage. The Manufacture of Gemona, destroyed by the earthquake, started the day 11 December 1976 the reconstruction of the company, while his employees in Udine and Pordenone were recovering part of the machinery. Burned by the Austrians in 1918, bombed by the Allies in 1945 it sprang up anew with the same determination as the previous times. The first heroic moment of reconstruction was marked by the alliance between entrepreneurs and workers, together determined to keep on-site the industrial production, to resume and increase the recently started modernization. Statistics confirm the results obtained from the leader companies and the craft businesses in the period when the majority of workers and factory hands was still homeless or precariously housed. The statistical data in this regard are clear: within the first year after the earthquake more than 90% of the 450 damaged factories had taken over the business. Employment in the industrial sector in 1978 exceeded the pre-quake levels.
The will to live near the factories kept reconstruction and development united. The "where it was, as it was" first of all accelerated the construction of modern houses. Restarting the preexisting meant to support growing businesses and improving their living conditions at the same time. Politicians and public opinion - not without open comparisons - were conscious interpreters of this ingrained social boost.
The case of Osoppo in the context of the Plain – looking to homes - is a particular one: the village of prefabricated, of which still the traces can be found, was replaced by an urban intervention on the destroyed center which was carried out through a detailed plan that gave an unusual stylistic unity to the country. The very heavy destructions and severe seismic risk explain the exception, but the times and the ways in which the fortress was later recovered respect the framework of the rapid housing recovery in support of industrial production, the slower and more accurate philological restoration of the historic landscape. Even in Osoppo stables and haylofts disappeared. Today the chipped wall of a "Braida", the historical walled estate, borders the Osovan road and keeps the memory of the traditional way of life.
By decentralizing the tasks of reconstruction and choosing to restart on the same location and with the same men the development already undertaken before 1976, it allowed the first recovery of the territory. Ten years later, almost all the wounds inflicted by the earthquake were healed while further goals were set in terms of modernization of infrastructure like roads, railways, universities, research centers.
Reconstruction and development: the historical memory
In the heart of the disastered area, which roughly coincided with the area of the recent industrial development, entrepreneurs and workers engaged in repair or rebuild factories and houses to keep the previously-won tasks, to support the pace of growth that had guaranteed them. The factory hands who worked in difficult winter conditions of 1976 can be considered, from this point of view, as the heroes of the "reconstruction development". According to this guiding idea, to restore the factories and the jobs meant to confirm the recent economic and social progress experienced. The Region, through timely laws that testify the intuition of its political leaders, interpreted these needs and energies, claimed priority to the reconstruction of factories, established through the mayors a directly relationship with the earthquake-stricken families for the repair and reconstruction of houses.
The reactivated production and the rebuilt houses configured soon as a positive premise of more ambitious goals. To complete the revival project it was necessary on one hand to recover the physiognomy of the old Friuli also to confirm the value of the cultural forces that had made the overcoming of the emergency possible; on the other hand to promote infrastructure that assigned active roles to the entire area and to reevaluate it in the most advanced Italian and European context. The well-being needed a solid foundation. Schools, roads, railways would support the productive apparatus only if the spirit of rebirth had maintained the original characters. Economic resources, as large as they could had been, would not be enough in the lack of the cultural context that kept alive the momentum of the revival.
The problem of memory, of traditional landscapes, it was faced - with virtually unlimited resources - especially by the Superintendency to the goods both artistical and historical, both environmental and architectural. The Region collaborated with it by turning its attention to more than fifteen hundred goods considered as "not bound" to complete the recovery of cultural heritage.
The medieval villages of Venzone and Gemona were reassembled. They respected the features of tradition because they maintained the volumes, size and style of the original artifacts. The makeover is noticeable, but it is valuable for the care with which it was conducted. It cannot be defined as a "historical false" a building complex whose stones, numbered and arranged in place, are the original ones. The duomo of Gemona also tells in dramatic terms about the contradiction between old and remade: outside flaunts a perfectly finished Gothic facade with the imposing St. Christopher who still looks at the medieval "wagons street", while inside the irregularly inclined columns of the church evoke the twists and bouncing impressed by seismic forces.
The Tricesimo, Cassacco, Colloredo castles, the Osoppo fortress, but also the little churches of St. Agnes and All Saints in Ospedaletto, the Abbey of Moggio mark again the landscapes that the earthquake had upset.
Restoration of important signs not only regarded the disaster area, but - for example - also the city of Udine. The castle, the church of Santa Maria, the house of Contadinanza, the Patriarchal Palace, the Basilica of Graces were rearranged and consolidated. The duomo of Spilimbergo, the Longobard temple of Cividale, the church of San Daniele in Castello and the Zuglio one have rediscovered the original features.
The widening of the interventions in larger areas than the maximum disaster one meant to affirm that the reclaiming of the Friulian cultural heritage was an essential condition of development of the full potential of the region. Only the whole growth could ensure success to the recovery of the part affected by the earthquake. The historical consciousness as a reconstruction engine is implied in the transformation of the Regional Centre for Cataloguing of cultural heritage of Passariano, established in 1971 in Regional Centre for Cataloguing and Restoration of Cultural Property in the same 1976.
The school for professional restorers tried to put into concrete action the preservation of historical heritage. The Archival Superintendence meanwhile saved the municipal archives sometimes rediscovering the value, ordering and inventorying in Udine and Trieste offices. A reconstruction-development called into question the whole region, involved the collaboration of parts not severely affected by the earthquake, renewed existing institutions before the earthquake by using their energy and skills.
The complexity of the problem of historical heritage can be measured by evaluating the restoration of churches destroyed by the earthquake, the reconstruction of the housing structure of the villages. The chapel of Molinis between Tarcento and Villafredda, which respects the proportions and the sobriety of traditional religiosity, is a happy exception. In other cases it has been determined by new structures the breaking of simplicity and less attention to what the shapes of the traditionally sacred expressed. Portis, which was imposed on the relocation, has lost the historical relationship with the Tagliamento and the sense of the name also its originality.
These are inevitable contradictions between the modern advancing and respect that the identity would have required. Professionals and technicians could not realize a perfect balance between the two requirements everywhere because the territorial upheaval showed them aspects from time to time different, because the unity pact that political and cultural forces had signed, implied a certain tolerance for divergent interpretations and solutions.
The road and railway infrastructures
The infrastructure policy as a prerequisite of industrialization was the renaissance model that the Friuli inhabitants had experienced with the unification of Italy. Pontebbana railroad and the Ledra-Tagliamento Channel, made in a very short time, had been accompanied by research centers and study, of which the Technical Institute "Antonio Zanon", the so called "little University of Udine," was an emblem. A quite similar pattern to what Quintino Sella had adopted in 1866 for the resurgence of the Friuli was approved unanimously by the Regional Council in a meeting hold on 1 February 1977. The basic document of the reconstruction matched the strengthening of a higher education and the establishment of the University of Udine in particular with the restructuring of the main road system, an unyielding support for the widespread industrialization of the area.
The upgrading of roads, highways and railways infrastructures of international interest first of all dealt with the modernization and doubling of the Pontebbana railway from Udine to Tarvisio, then the completion of the motorway from Carnia to Coccau, the modernization of routes n. 13 in the section Pontebba - Malborghetto and n. 251 Maniago-Barcis, and finally the construction of the tunnel of Monte Croce Carnico and of "a western road infrastructure connecting the Piedmontese" (Cimpello-Sequals-Gemona).
The old Pontebbana railroad was kept active until the completion of the new one. Currently an almost complete cycling path occupies the premises and touches the abandoned stations of Moggio, Resiutta, Chiusaforte, Dogna, Pietratagliata. The new railway that runs almost always in tunnels from Moggio to Pontebba, from Pontebba to Tarvisio, allows high speeds and greater frequency of trains. The line potential is only partially exploited also because the development of the Adriatic ports is not yet in place, due to the fact that highway and expressway absorb some of the traffic, because the Balkans after the fall of the Berlin Wall have assumed a new value.
The highway, made with engineering criteria similar to those of the railway in terms of tunnels and viaducts, was completed in 1986. The exit of Osoppo, opened on late for contrasts between municipalities, precedes those of Carnia, Pontebba and Tarvisio. Trips as Udine-Tolmezzo or Udine-Tarvisio now can be covered in a very short time comparing to 1976. The main road 13 Pontebbana fully rebuilt from Tricesimo to Coccau is a free toll way, modern and fast. The Maniago-Barcis galleries have solved the traffic problems in Valcellina, the consequent access to the Piave valley via Longarone. While the western Piedmontese, built from Cimpello to Sequals for completion towards Gemona, presents new obstacles, the tunnel of Monte Croce Carnico project is abandoned also because of the different Austrian centralized transport strategies.
The main roads that were supposed to enhance the movement of goods and persons from the Adriatic to central and Eastern Europe have played and still perform their task without exhausting its potential. It can become harder to judge if the benefits that the Alpine valleys have made are analyzed. The reconstruction has not rewarded the areas already in economic and demographic crisis, on the contrary it has favoured the abandonment.
Dogna, whose chiouts, farmhouses in altitude, have been completely redone, is dominated by the State road n. 13, which seems to look the 'village, the church and the bell tower as obstacles to be avoided.
Pontebba, which lays in a stretch of a valley deeply incised by the stream Fella, is stifled by what remains of the railway station (the big custom-house has been closed in 1993), by the new railway, the national road, the highway, the huge junctions roads, by the pipeline.
These two cases explain enough how the recovery of the housing estates has not supported the economic and social growth anywhere, as the mountain has often suffered invasive road infrastructure without raising objections or proposing alternatives. The main roads, which in Canal del Ferro sometimes seem imposed with arrogance, have been accepted as part of an inexorable demographic decline, of almost definitive renunciation of all development.
The disorderly advance of forest on slopes that included meadows-pastures testifies the end of mountain farming as a subsidiary income and as a landscape-caring system, and it confirms the reconstruction as an accelerator of negative economic processes that were in place before the earthquake.
Endangered lifestyles were canceled harshly. In the mountainside, where the subsidiary agriculture, care of meadows and pastures and woodlands survived in serious decline, settlements were rebuilt according to new modules, which dealing with needs felt for some time now excluded stables and barns. From this point of wiew the rebirth of Friuli is configured as a break in tradition, the end of a slow process of decay.
The University of Udine
In the document unanimously approved by the Regional Council of February 1, 1977 there is a reference to the Regional Urban Plan (PUR), drafted immediately before the catastrophe. It recommends a welding of the reconstruction work with the overall design of the development of the Friuli-Venezia Giulia Region. At issue were the reintegration of the territory affected into the whole region and the continuity of the programs in place before May 1976 in favor of the Friuli economic and social growth. The national reconstruction law of August 8, 1977 welcomed the strategic choice based on the repair of damaged buildings, then the so-called "where it was, how it was." The fact, that enhanced the will of restarting the development process interrupted by the earthquake without losing touch with its territory, was immediately shared and strongly demanded by public opinion. Research centers worked therefore in supporting the restoration of the building and completion of road infrastructures for homeland security and expanding industries.
The founding of the University of Udine, which was among the projects developed before the earthquake, reestablished the continuity of development programs that the earthquake could stop. From this point of wiew the Friulian university can be considered - even for the manner in which it was created - a significant and exemplary moment of the reconstruction.
The request for a medical faculty in Udine, emphasized by the student demonstrations of 1965 and 1966, dated back to the early Sixties. At the time it was accepted the idea of a regional university with two locations. It's important to read again the reasons why in later years certain degree programs or faculties were urged to be decentralized in Udine.
In 1972 the Consortium for the Constitution and the Development of University Courses in Udine, at the Presidency of the Regional Government in Trieste, agreed with the rector and in front of the regional aldermen for education and health that would be activated in Udine sections of faculty of engineering, science, Slavic languages and literatures, which would set up commissions for the activation of the courses in medicine and transport sciences.
It was immediately clear that the University of Trieste would not maintain its obligations, so the choice of an independent University thus became necessary.
In 1974 Diego Carpenedo, on behalf of the Province of Udine, proposed to set up - now within a separate University – a degree program in industrial technology in support of small and medium industries, in soil conservation and land use planning, the establishment of the agrarian faculty. He emphasized - unambiguously and certainly not for a merely personal purpose - a direct relationship between scientific research, industrial and environmental safety development. He defined what should be the distinctive character of the new university: to govern development and territory.
The law reconstruction of Friuli, which included the creation of the faculty of Eastern European languages, engineering for soil conservation and for the management of enterprises, the agricultural and food preparations sciences at Udine, respected and pursued this orientation. In 1979 it was drawn up the building program under which the new university would be established in the urbanized territory to determine useful integrations with the cultural and scientific facilities of the city.
Udine was already the capital of reconstruction as it welcomed research centers, professionals, technical journals, publishers specifically oriented to the solution of the problems that the earthquake had raised, but mainly because it was the place where political forces normally at odds with each other had found an agreement without waiving on its own ideological beliefs and cooperating to the resumption of Friuli showing energy and realism. The case of "Rebuild", the quarterly journal for technical information founded in 1977, is significant because it was able to aggregate useful forces for the reconstruction ensuring all full autonomy of expression, because it was accompanied by the monthly "sheet of Rebuild", addressed to a readers base larger and popular.
The "system of two centers", due to which the seats of the new university were ordered, foresaw a settlement in the old part of the city (first Palazzo Antonini) and an "external university area" (former cotton mill). Forecasts and assessments of the PUR, which in the disastered area would not have any sense, were recalled in the quantification of the student population and the university building requirements to demonstrate its already indicated willingness to pursue in perfect continuity the social and economic development that the years before the earthquake had set.
Hinged in the city of Udine the new institution devoted itself to the urgent problems of the territory. In fact a large part of the literature on the earthquake depended on the Friulian academic production.
Positively represented here, the theme of continuity concerns from another perspective the collapse of the mountain that at first was slowed up and muffled by the building restoration and by the roads building along the river Fella, but later it was abandoned to the previous degradation fate because they do not integrate with the widespread industrialization of the most advanced Friuli.
New territorial balances
For the first time in Italy the reconstruction of a disaster-affected area was brought to term and especially in a reasonable time. Ten years after the earthquake most of the problems had been solved. Homes, services, factories, infrastructures were back in business. The credit must be given to the decentralization promptly decided by the Government, to the joint action of the Region and municipalities, but mainly to the determination of the affected people to do not interrupt the path of recently undertaken development. The mayors were the protagonists of the great transformation of the Friuli earthquake stricken. The needs of citizens found an interpreter and mediator. It was in fact to recognize the destruction of old settlements, to evaluate what had to be back on its feet and what to be given up. The priority assigned to the factories and the choice of traditional centers of life lined up perfectly with the widespread industrialization that characterized the growth of a good part of the area stricken by th earthquake. The development of roads and support of new research centers completed a transformation project that involved the entire region and Udine in particular. The capital of Friuli proved to have knowledge and skills able to deal with emergency and a real reconstruction. The agreement between political forces favored the collaboration between those who led the recovery. The restoration of productive assets and building structures was a true time of rebuilding. The cultural heritage was safeguarded at every level. The University of Udine completed the framework of structures supporting business, land, cultural identity. Development processes were seconded and confirmed the success of the reconstruction itself, which in Italy has been presented as a model, as a result to be imitated. In the mountainside, where the walls of every most remote farmhouse were rebuilt, settlements continued to be abandoned. A specific safeguard plan was not prepared. Apart from isolated proposals, focusing normally on tourist vocations, the trends of the slopes of growing wild and the rapid demographic decline were accepted as fatal.
The area affected by the earthquake is the same that suffered the destructions of the Austrian invasion after Caporetto and the hardest bombings of World War II. It remained (thankfully) as an empty voice that "di besoi", which was born from those experiences, because in this event the Italian state was timely and generous in assists. In the case of the Alpine municipalities it lacked a previously elaborated program of renaissance. The landscapes of constant fatigue could only be conceived of as natural parks and were rejected by the inhabitants of the mountain itselves. It was also in this case an aspect of the reconstruction, a problem for certain new aspects, of the new Friuli.
Tommaso Mazzoli
The voice of the protagonists.
In addition to the research carried out in regional, provincial and municipal archives, on the bibliography about the earthquake there were interviewed some of the protagonists of the emergency. The collected testimonies can be heard in the online version reached here:
- Luciano Di Sopra, urbanista. Udine, 11 marzo 2016
- Ivano Benvenuti, ex sindaco di Gemona. Gemona, 12 marzo 2016
- Lorenzo Cozianin, ex sindaco di Ragogna, Ragogna, 12 marzo 2016
- Luciana Marioni Bros, già coordinatrice del Centro di Restauro di Villa Manin, Udine, 1 aprile 2016
- Carlo Comin, esperto di grande viabilità stradale e ferroviaria, Tricesimo, 1 aprile 2016
Besides his vocal commentary, urban planner Luciano Di Sopra helped on writing the text stressing how the estimate of the damage has been considered - among the instruments of reconstruction – an innovation of the highest importance. In a few months after the earthquake was made and condensed in a volume from this point of wiew fundamental An estimate of the damage caused by seismic activity at the Friuli 1976, Monographs "Rebuild", # 1, Udine, 1977.
Ivano Benvenuti, at the time mayor of Gemona, on the conversation that followed the recording told how on May 8, 1976 in "Goi" barracks Aldo Moro applied to Antonio Comelli, asking him if the region would be able to handle the reconstruction. Comelli would then questioned with his sight Salvatore Varisco and the same Benvenuti. As they shyly nodded he would accept the huge responsibility. The mayor wants to recognize the strategic value of the Moro's choice and the courage of local administrators.
Lorenzo Cozianin, former mayor of Ragogna, while recalling the dramatic moments of the post-earthquake, remembered the hard conditions of the traditional Friuli, the slow ascent that industrialization was enhancing, the commitment of the Fantoni business to root again in the territory and the agreeing will of rebirth. His interpretation scheme can be found, partly, in the innovative text by Pierluigi and Roberto Grandinetti, The Friuli case. Backwardness or development?, Cooperative "Il Campo", Udine, 1979.
Luciana Marioni Bros, former coordinator of the Villa Manin Center for Restoration, carried out an extraordinary work. To realize the scale and quality of the commitment it can only refer to the 3847 cards prepared and collected by her in the volume edited by Gian Carlo Menis, A museum in the earthquake, GEAP, Pordenone, 1988.
Carlo Comin, expert on main road and railway, reiterated that the value of the infrastructure created thanks to the post-earthquake reconstruction, have maintained and maintain their effectiveness over time. It would therefore be possible to integrate them with the development of the Adriatic ports, especially of Trieste. This point of view, already present in the regional urban plan before the earthquake, deserves more study because it could allow to the Friuli an active role in the new era of globalization.
A bibliography which deepens these problems can be laid in the two texts published on the occasion of the tenth and the twentieth anniversary of the earthquake: S. Smith (eds), 1976-1986. The reconstruction of Friuli, IRES, Udine, 1986; Bonfanti P. (eds), Friuli 1976-1996. Contributions to the reconstruction model, FORUM, Udine, 1996.
Trad. Maria Cristina Davanzo.