Firefighters were accompanying Pietro’s owners to retrieve personal belongings from the house, when they heard some weak miaowing.
Advertisement
Video footage showed the cat being lifted from underneath destroyed parts of the building.
The cat has a fractured jaw, but otherwise appears to be fine.
The cat, named Pietro, survived with no food and only rainwater after being trapped under a collapsed home.
“It’s really true that cats have nine lives, look at that”, said one of the firefighters at the scene.
Oipa set out in search of the cat, after a girl who lost her parents in the natural disaster reported that their three cats could have been buried by the crumbling house. After a number of failed attempts to find the cats, they heard cat meows from under the ruins.
Amongst all the wreckage, the rescue of a tenacious house cat brings a glint of light to the tragedy.
Cats and dogs have been rescued from rubble weeks after the quake struck. It was severely dehydrated and firefighters immediately gave it a drink of water before sending the animal to a vet’s surgery in the town of Rieti.
Advertisement
Last week, a golden retriever called Romeo was pulled from the rubble, more than nine days after he was given up for dead.
