Amatrice's ten-year wait tests faith in the state

As people gathered in Amatrice on Monday for a mass marking the tenth anniversary of the earthquake that devastated the town, the Guardian reported that anger is mounting over the slow pace of reconstruction. According to the Guardian, as of April two-thirds of planned public projects in Amatrice had yet to begin, rising to seven in ten in the hardest-hit areas.

The 2016 earthquake struck central Italy on 24 August, killing hundreds of people and flattening entire hilltop towns across the Apennines. A decade on, the Guardian's reporting describes a community still waiting for the state to deliver on its promises of rebuilding.

For the Abruzzo bureau, the story is painfully familiar. L'Aquila, the regional capital, was struck by its own devastating earthquake in 2009, and its reconstruction has been a long and contested process. The slow recovery of Amatrice, just across the regional border, is read here as a measure of how much — or how little — has changed.

The Guardian's report focuses on the gap between official pledges and visible progress. While the town's church and some landmarks have been restored, much of the residential and public fabric remains unfinished. The paper quotes the frustration of residents who returned to a landscape of cranes and scaffolding that, a decade on, still defines the town's skyline.

The 2016 quake was part of a seismic sequence that struck a cluster of mountain communities in the regions of Lazio, Umbria, Marche and Abruzzo. Amatrice, known across Italy for its pasta dish amatriciana, became the symbolic face of the disaster after photographs of its collapsed medieval centre circulated worldwide.

For the inner Apennines, the slow reconstruction is not merely an administrative failure but a demographic one. Foreign reporting has repeatedly noted that young people who left after the quake have not returned, and that the region's already sparse population is ageing further. The Guardian's anniversary coverage underscores how the physical rebuilding and the social rebuilding are intertwined.

The anniversary mass on Monday drew national attention, but the Guardian's reporting suggests that for many residents, ceremony is no substitute for homes. The paper notes that as of April, the majority of planned public projects in the worst-affected areas had not even started, a fact that will weigh on trust in state institutions for years to come.