Amatrice's unfinished recovery: 10 years on, reconstruction lags

As people gathered in Amatrice on Monday for a mass to mark the 10th anniversary of the earthquake that devastated the central Italian town, the Guardian reported that the recovery is far from complete. According to the newspaper, as of April, two-thirds of planned public projects in Amatrice had yet to begin, rising to seven in 10 in the hardest-hit areas.

The 2016 earthquake struck on 24 August, killing hundreds of people and razing entire towns across a swathe of central Italy. The Guardian's report, published on the eve of the anniversary, highlights the slow pace of reconstruction, a process that has been punctuated by bureaucratic delays and disputes over the safety of rebuilding in a seismically active zone.

For the Piemonte bureau, the story is one of engineering and institutional capacity as much as memory. The region's industrial base in Turin and its polytechnic university have long supplied the technical expertise for Italian infrastructure projects, from Alpine tunnels to high-speed rail. The question of why a wealthy European state takes a decade to rebuild a small town is one that resonates in a region that lives by its own industrial competence.