ROME A minute of silence will be observed before all professional football matches in Italy this week to mourn the victims of an quake that rocked the central part of the country early Wednesday.
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“The town isn’t here anymore”, Amatrice mayor Sergio Pirozzi said. The death toll continued to climb throughout the day as rescuers search for survivors and bodies amid the debris in the regions of Lazio, Umbria and Marche.
The epicenter of today’s quake, which hit around 3:30 a.m. local time, was about 6.2 miles (10 km) southeast of the historic tourist town of Norcia.
A general view of Pescara del Tronto shows damage caused by an natural disaster early Wednesday morning.
The office of Premier Matteo Renzi tweeted that heavy equipment was on its way.
Amatrice, Accumoli and Pescara del Tronto, in the Apennine Mountains, are among the hardest-hit towns.
Some 100km northeast of Rome, the town of Amatrice is devastated, with entire buildings razed and the air thick with dust and smelling strongly of gas. Amatrice, birthplace of the famed spaghetti all’amatriciana bacon-tomato pasta sauce, is made up of 69 hamlets that rescue teams were working to reach. “The whole ceiling fell but did not hit me”, marveled resident Maria Gianni. The woman is sitting on the ground in front of a blanket and a ladder as she checks her cellphone.
” ‘It was one of the most lovely towns of Italy and now there’s nothing left, ‘ she said, too distraught to give her name”. ‘I don’t know what we’ll do’. “People crying for help, help. Rescue workers arrived after one hour. one and a half hours”.
Emma Tucker, the deputy editor of The Times of London, was one of the thousands of people on vacation in the region struck by the natural disaster. “I don’t know what to say. We are living this huge tragedy”, said the Reverend Savino D’Amelio, a local parish priest. “We are only hoping there will be the least number of victims possible and that we all have the courage to move on”.
Aerial footage showed whole areas of Amatrice, voted previous year as one of Italy’s most attractive historic towns, flattened by the quake. Some 100 people were still unaccounted for in the village of Arquata del Tronto.
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The first quake struck around 3:30 a.m. local time near Norcia, a small town roughly 105 miles from Rome, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.
