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Cartoon with quake victims under lasagna angers Italians

The preeminent Italian architect and engineer Renzo Piano has been asked by Prime Minister Matteo Renzi to help with reconstruction efforts in central Italy after last week’s 6.2-magnitude quake devastated the region’s cultural heritage, the Guardian reports.

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While many Italians showed solidarity with the magazine after the 2015 attack, writing “Je suis Charlie Hebdo” (I am Charlie Hebdo) on social media, the cartoon in the magazine’s current edition was called “terrible”, “in bad taste”, and “disrespectful” on Twitter, Facebook and elsewhere.

“My home has been destroyed and I have lost everything”.

Piano has stressed the importance of introducing new laws to ensure structures are natural disaster resistant in the future, saying, “We have to act quickly, with the utmost urgency”.

Piano met with Prime Minister Matteo Renzi over the weekend to discuss ways to quickly build housing for the up to 3,000 people who were displaced by the natural disaster and to resurrect three flattened medieval towns, where most of the buildings-including a school that was retrofitted for earthquakes in 2012-could not withstand the shaking.

Displaced residents are now being housed in tent camps, but the aim is to move them into simple wooden structures before winter.

The Italian government plans to build lightweight wooden housing for the displaced within the next six months, and then begin construction on the towns of Amatrice, Accumoli, and Arquata del Tronto. Though this plan involves millions of buildings, the 78-year-old architect believes it can be achieved if it’s done over at least a couple of generations. Though issues such as corruption, bureaucracy and illegality act as stumbling blocks in Italy, he is optimistic about the country overcoming these obstacles.

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Piano was made an ambassador for heritage organisation UNESCO in 1995, and has previously worked on humanitarian architecture projects in Italy and Africa.

A dog has been found in rubble nine days after a powerful earthquake struck central Italy