It was the picture that brought home the human tragedy of the earthquake that
left Italy devastated this week. Staggering around in the rubble, unsure
whether to cry with grief or joy, Antonello Colangeli held his head in his
hands and wept as he watched his son being pulled from the debris.
The scene would be repeated across the region of Abruzzo, east of Rome. The
pain of those looking for their loved ones was compounded with every
aftershock.
Five days after the 6.3 magnitude earthquake destroyed his home town of
L’Aquila, crushing students as they slept and entombing entire families
inside collapsed homes, Dr Colangeli presses his fingers against his temples
once again. This time it is in disbelief at what he likes to call a small
series of miracles.
His son Giulio, who is 20, lived. Nearly 300 others, including his uncle,
aunt, and friends, did not.
The Times found Dr Colangeli, a lung specialist at San Salvatore
hospital, itself badly damaged by the earthquake, at his son’s bedside in
Rome. “I am a doctor. I am a rational man. But I can only say that all those
signs, all those coincidences, that led me to my son, must have been sent
from God,” he said.
Giulio, an economics student at the University of L’Aquila, lies at the other
end of the corridor, in intensive care. He remains sedated, and on kidney
dialysis. His left leg is badly damaged and he is being treated for “crush
syndrome” – severe trauma to the upper body that can lead to organ failure.
His doctors, though, are hopeful that he will recover.
“One of the first things he said when he was pulled out was, ‘Dad, I’ve got to
study for exams’,” Dr Colangeli said, laughing at the reaction of his son.
“This is a boy who has never cared about schoolwork in his life, and he
waits until he’s being pulled out of the rubble to worry about his exams.”
He smiled, and shook his head.
A total of 272 people have been confirmed dead after Italy’s deadliest
earthquake in 30 years.
Dr Colangeli, 52, prides himself on being a man of science, yet he attributes
his son’s survival to “something close to divine intervention”.
Most of the family had spent the weekend at their holiday home by the sea,
about an hour’s drive from L’Aquila. Giulio stayed in the city to spend the
weekend with his friends and said goodbye to his father, his mother, Cinzia,
and his 14-year-old sister, Alessia.
“He phoned us to say there had been some tremors and that he and his best
friend, Lorenzo, were going to stay at another friend’s house on a street
near by,” Dr Colangeli said.
The family returned on Sunday evening. When the earthquake struck shortly
after 3.30am that night, they managed to escape as the apartment blocks
imploded around them. Dr Colangeli’s first reaction was one of horror. “I
could not remember the street where Giulio said he was staying. Can you
imagine the fear of not knowing where to look for your son? It was dark. It
was cold. And I didn’t have the slightest idea where my son was. I was
frantic. I simply had this intuition.”
As he staggered through the debris, underneath fractured balconies and shards
of metal that hung precariously overhead, he made his way with the help of a
few strangers in the direction of the block where he thought that his son
was staying. He did not know the address, but that did not matter. The
building was no longer there. In its place were only broken walls and
shattered glass.
“There were lots of mechanical diggers, each moving through the debris very
slowly and precisely. I didn’t know what to do,” he said. “I saw one of the
cave experts, drafted in to help the rescue. I am not a mad man but I swear
he appeared as if illuminated by some sort of divine halo. I followed him
around the edge of the rubble, shouting, ‘Giulio!’ ‘Giulio!’.”
Then, he heard it – “a faint voice, saying ‘Papa, I’m here. I can’t breathe’.”
It was at that moment, on hearing his son’s voice from beneath the debris,
that the distraught father was photographed. His image was used on front
pages across the world, alerting millions to the suffering that this
disaster has wreaked.
The reunion of a father with his son, being carried to safety on a stretcher,
was also captured on camera. “My son is the most important thing in the
world to me. When he was born, there were difficulties with his breathing,
and that worry has never stopped. To see him pulled out like that, was such
an extraordinary mixture of emotions – of pain, and fear, and relief.”
D r Colangeli claimed not to be particularly superstitious, but recalled a
symmetry to the events that followed. “When they carried Giulio out, I ran
out and flagged down the very next ambulance that passed. I asked where they
were going and if they had room. They said yes.”
The ambulance’s other passenger was one of the doctor’s own inpatients, an
elderly man who was being taken by his daughter, also a doctor, to the
hospital where she worked in Rome. “It was like a divine exchange. I had
treated her dad, and she was able to help my son.”
The supposedly earthquake-proof L’Aquila hospital building suffered extensive
damage, forcing staff to move patients out of the wards and into a field
hospital set up in the car park, or to facilities elsewhere.
Was Dr Colangeli torn between tending to his son and helping colleagues to
treat the injured in L’Aquila? “I have asked them if they need any help, and
they say they have plenty of staff, so in that sense my conscience is
clear.” He has been advised to stay as long as it takes for his son to
recover. When asked how long he expects that to be, he blanches. “As long as
it takes.”
So while tens of thousands of survivors spend more uncertain nights in tents
and cars across Abruzzo, Dr Colangeli sleeps at the hospital, more than 40
miles from the medieval mountain town where his family have lived for
generations. “I will not know for sure how many of my friends, and
neighbours, I have lost until I return to L’Aquila and go through the lists
of the dead.”
He has since found out that his son’s best friend did not survive. “I have
such contrasting emotions. I feel the good fortune of finding my son, but
there is also such pain inside that Lorenzo, the boy I’ve known all his
life, who I’ve coached on sports fields as a child, is dead.”
Then he said: “If I may, I’d like to tell a little anecdote. Do you know why
L’Aquila celebrates the Carnival a day later than the rest of Italy?”
He explained. “Three hundred years ago there was another earthquake in
L’Aquila.” It was the first day of the national Carnival, February 2, 1703.
Villagers had packed the churches, travelling from across the region to
celebrate the day of Candelora, when the clergy bless candles and lead
prayers.
The earthquake destroyed the entire city, toppling the churches and burying
their congregations alive. More than 800 were believed to have been killed.
“They say the earthquake lasted so long that worshippers were able to recite
all of their Latin prayers before the tremors stopped,” he said. “From then
on, no one wanted to celebrate the festival on that day, because what was
there to celebrate?”
H e is unsure as Easter approaches whether his fellow Aquilani should
celebrate the survivors, or despair of the dead, but the resonance of the
season is lost neither on Dr Colangeli nor the rest of this strongly
Catholic community. Good Friday is a national day of mourning and it will be
spent burying the hundreds of victims, including his Uncle Gianni – “a
second father to me” – and Aunt Betty.
Easter, he noted, was usually when congregations would be read scriptures such
as Luke xxiv, 1-12 in anticipation of the Resurrection. “Searching for
Giulio through the rubble that night, I couldn’t help thinking of those
words,” he said. “Why do you seek the living among the dead?”
