The Ten-Year Account

Ten years after the earth moved beneath Amatrice, the world's newspapers have returned to the town to take an account. The Guardian's Rome correspondent reports that two-thirds of planned public projects in the town had yet to begin as of April, and that in the hardest-hit areas the figure rises to seven in ten. These are numbers that arrive with the solemnity of a ledger, and they deserve to be read slowly.

We would not quarrel with the arithmetic. The record of reconstruction in central Italy is a record of delays, of paperwork, of funds allocated and not spent. But the foreign correspondent's arithmetic is also a measure of something else: the half-life of international sympathy. A disaster is a moment; a recovery is a decade. The world's cameras lingered on Amatrice in August 2016, and then moved on to the next rupture, the next flood, the next fire.

What the international press captures, and what it cannot, is the difference between a headline and a home. The Guardian's report is honest about the anger of residents, and that anger is the truest gauge of the distance between promise and pavement. Yet we would add a caution: the slow work of rebuilding a community is not only a matter of cranes and concrete. It is the rebuilding of trust in institutions, a material that cannot be poured or prefabricated.

The world's coverage of Italy's disasters tends to follow a familiar arc: shock, sympathy, scrutiny, silence. The scrutiny that remains, ten years on, is to be welcomed. But we would ask the foreign reader to hold two thoughts at once: that the delay is a scandal, and that the scandal is also a story about how the world forgets. Both are true, and both deserve a place in the ledger.

Amatrice will mark its anniversary with a mass, as the Guardian notes. The dead are remembered; the living wait. For our part, we will keep the account open, and we hope the world's newspapers will too.