Metaphorically speaking, Italy has had its share of earthquakes over the past few years. After Berlusconi’s government was dissolved in order to make way for Mario Monti’s technical government, life was turned upside down with the introduction of new taxes, the eruption of financial scandals involving all major political parties, and the success of comedian Beppe Grillo’s Five Star Movement in the elections of February 2013.

Further, in May 2012, Italy was shook up in a more literal way. The Northern region of Emilia-Romagna was struck by a heavy earthquake, which was repeated ten days later. A year has passed and much has yet to be done. Nevertheless, during the anniversary, politicians and the media indulged in a triumphant rhetoric that highlighted the great commitment of citizens and institutions in the reconstruction of “Emilia” (the western and north-eastern part of the region, where the epicenter of the earthquake was based). A reconstruction has yet to begin, leading to an explosion of local grassroots committees consisting of people who were affected both by the earthquake and by a bureaucratic rigmarole. The state bureaucracy has complicated the lives of the locals, this in a climate of crisis and austerity. As the state has responded only to the degree that it serves private corporate interests, citizens were left to fend for themselves, repeating a historic pattern.

The Emilia earthquake represents the last in a series of natural disasters in Italy, which never really produced any progressive legislation capable of transmitting know-how to future generations. A law was first passed in the 1970s, in the wake of two catastrophes that drew wide media attention. In 1980, a disastrous earthquake in the mountainous Irpinia region (Southern Italy) further sensitized public opinion, leading to the creation – in 1982 – of the Ministry of Civil Protection. However, the national civil protection system originated only in 1992, whereas the first legislative decree that would give the Italian regions executive powers was created years later (for a brief history of civil protection in Italy see David E. Alexander, “The Evolution of Civil Protection in Modern Italy,” in John Dickie, John Foot and Frank M. Snowden (eds), Disastro! Disasters in Italy since 1860: Culture, Politics, Society, New York: Palgrave, 2002).

Rather than being focused on the prevention of catastrophes and the safeguarding of citizens, civil protection legislation in Italy has thus been subjugated to political games and economical lines of reasoning.

An earthquake that struck the Northern Friuli region, in 1976, played an important role in this process. For the first time, both the first aid and the reconstruction phases occurred on a more local level. As a consequence, the reconstruction of Friuli followed a logic which was also adopted after a 1997 earthquake in Central Italy: it consisted in the safeguarding of the original organization of the affected locations as opposed to relocation and decentralization, which had instead been applied in Irpinia in the 1980s and – more recently – in the city of L’Aquila, devastated by an earthquake in 2009. Here the Italian Civil Protection regained the hierarchical and centralized format of the pre-Friuli period, in line with Berlusconi’s attempts – throughout the 2000s – to expand the power of the head of government through the Civil Protection.

This reflects what Naomi Klein (2008) has defined “disaster capitalism” or “economic shock treatment”: the exploitation of the public’s disorientation following massive collective shocks, such as natural disasters or terrorist attacks, in order to achieve control by imposing economic shock therapy. In The Shock Doctrine, Klein criticizes Milton Friedman’s ideas about the pushing through of reforms in the wake of catastrophic events, a mechanism that was also adopted by the Italian civil protection system. In the management of the Irpinia earthquake of 1980, for example, “modern” forms of living were pushed through, such as the widening of the typically narrow streets of the medieval towns so as to create more parking space. Similarly, the imposition of a specific way of life upon people marked the reconstruction of L’Aquila, in particular through the creation of New Towns. The latter consisted of a mass of buildings in a peripheral area for some 15,000 evacuees, creating lucrative building opportunities exploited by major companies supervised by the state, at the expense of local businesses. In addition, the New Towns strongly isolated people from the urban context and eliminated those collective places where people used to meet and socialize, resulting in the persistence of a sense of trauma.

The city of L’Aquila itself, however, has remained untouched. Four years later it is a ghost town, a future prey to real estate speculation. The reconstruction process has turned out to be no more than a political and economical bargain for the Civil Protection and for Berlusconi’s government, aimed as it was at accelerating “processes of privatization and the embezzlement of space, power, rights, nearly always to the advantage of a few, and profiteering choices at the expense of a democratic decision-making procedure.” (Stefano Ventura in Sismografie, Ritornare a L’Aquila mille giorni dopo il sisma, 2012, p. 20).

The L’Aquila case, then, reflects the incapacity and unwillingness of the Italian state to intervene adequately in similar situations, as also happened after the Irpinia earthquake, where “[s]elf-help was the only form of aid” (Alexander, p. 171). The absence of the state is indeed reflected in the fact that Italians have often had to find alternative solutions to natural disasters, such as self-help and volunteerism. Similarly, delay in bringing aid has been “a recurrent theme in Italian disasters” (ibid.): first aid after the Irpinia earthquake was delayed by 24 to 30 hours, whereas squanders and scandals in the reconstruction process earned it the nickname of “Irpiniagate,” contributing to a highly negative, collective memory of earthquakes in Italy.

Perhaps it was this memory that induced the mayor of L’Aquila to make the provocative statement – in a TV interview during the 4th anniversary of the L’Aquila earthquake, in April 2013 – about “disconnecting” L’Aquila from Italy if funds were not released for the reconstruction of the city. His anxiety reflects the risk that L’Aquila will end up like the Irpinia region or like Messina, the port city near the northeast corner of Sicily which witnessed massive emigration after a devastating earthquake in 1908.

In spite of the rigid and military control of the Civil Protection in L’Aquila, in the tent camps that were set up after the earthquake, a number of initiatives developed in which local inhabitants tried to gain a more active and democratic role in the reconstruction process, allowing them to become social actors in a bottom-up process. The grassroots mobilization in Emilia offers another example of this type of engagement. If a state fails to provide adequate civil protection and resolve bureaucratic problems, all the while promoting a false image of the reconstruction process, it is up to the people – as happens too often in Italy – to speak out and claim their rights.