A house narrowly escaped the landslide that devastated the town of Casamicciola on the Italian island of Ischia on November 26, 2022. SALVATORE LAPORTA/AP
From the top of Mount Epomeo to the gray waters of the Gulf of Naples, under a sad sky, the turbulent landscape that can be seen from the last walkable loop of the Via Celario tells the whole story of the Italian island of Ischia, its fragility , its beauty , its violence.
At dawn on November 26, after an unusually heavy rain fell within hours, an entire section of the mountain slid toward the sea in an avalanche of mud and loose volcanic rock.
The scar left by its passage starts near the peaks, passes through old abandoned chestnut plantations and then branches with abandoned hotels thanks to the relief and the roads marked for cars that wind down the side of the mountain towards the sea and restaurants in this off-season. As of Wednesday, November 30, nine bodies, including that of a 21-day-old newborn, already been found in the course of the mudslides.
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Rescuers are digging into the rubble of a house further up the slope. From a distance, the postures of those in uniform evoke a heaviness that has something to do with the presence of death. Other corpses are still buried up there, between the mud, the rocks of the mountain and the concrete of these dwellings built in normative vagueness, but which, for various reasons, they all accuse of having proved murderous.
ancient controversies
One person is still missing, the next day, Thursday December 1, two lifeless bodies are being pulled out of this muddy magma whose opinion, media and Italian officials have been searching for political sources for a week. Old controversies about spatial planning are discussed daily, while in connection with the climate crisis the multiplication of extreme weather events on a particularly exposed and fragile national territory contributes to increasing tensions.
The tax consultant Alessandra Daniele, 44, sinks into the mud in rubber boots and looks over the destroyed landscape of her home island. She has just been refused by two Carabinieri, who were sent to Ischia after the disaster, to approach the search area where among the relatives of the missing is one of her acquaintances whom she would have liked to help. “In the days of our grandparents and great-grandparents, we were an island of farmers who turned their backs on the sea and cared for the mountains. With the development of tourism, we have done the opposite. The economy of the island has changed and so has its nature,” she sums up.
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