Besides the looting incidence, an Italian bishop said Pope Francis was jolted awake by the quake and went to celebrate a Mass for people suffering in the catastrophe.
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Deputy Mayor Gianluca Carloni said his uncle’s body had still not been recovered from the hotel, which was particularly busy at this time of year because of a food festival.
In a related development, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg met with Francis at the Vatican on Monday and afterward announced that Facebook will give 500,000 euros, or about $560,000, to the Italian Red Cross to help relief efforts in the earthquake-stricken region north of Rome.
Towns all over Italy have taken part in the event, collecting money for the victims of the 6.2 magnitude quake which hit the regions of Lazio and Le Marche bordering Umbria on Wednesday 24 August.
Earlier Monday, survivors in Amatrice, where at least 229 people perished in the August 24 quake, started shouting angrily after authorities informed them the funeral Mass would be celebrated Tuesday evening at Rieti airport.
Sergio Pirozzo, mayor of the town of Amatrice, said news of the pope’s visit gives “great comfort”. The funeral will be held at the edge of Amatrice’s obliterated medieval town center, on the grounds of a Catholic retreat home for elderly and others seeking a quiet respite in the mountains. Some relatives who live elsewhere in Italy had sent hearses with coffins to claim their loved one’s body for funerals elsewhere.
Some 8,000 to 10,000 Romanians were living in the area where the quake struck.
With thousands left homeless after the quake, authorities are debating how to provide warmer, sturdier housing for them besides the rows of emergency blue tents.
People rest in a playground next to the tent camp that was set in Pescara Del Tronto, central Italy, Monday, Aug. 29, 2016.
Meanwhile, it is also learned some people are sleeping in their cars parked near their homes in fear of getting looted.
Now Prime Minister Matteo Renzi has now asked Renzo Piano, the Italian modernist architect who designed the London skyscraper and co-built the Pompidou Centre in Paris, to play a leading role in reconstruction and disaster prevention. Speaking in an interview Sunday in Corriere della Sera newspaper, Piano proposed building temporary wooden homes near the three devastated towns in central Italy so that traumatized people could stay near their roots.
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“But the fact that it’s a long-term project isn’t a good reason not to start immediately”, Renzi said.
