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.