Quake Funeral Underway; Bishop Urges Courage

It had apparently been written by one of the firemen who rescued Giorgia.

Italian President Sergio Mattarella flew to the town by helicopter on Saturday to see the damage for himself before travelling on to the nearby city of Ascoli Piceno for the funeral service held in a sports centre.

The 6.2-magnitude quake hit in the early hours of Wednesday, 100km (65 miles) north-east of Rome.

In Amatrice, the situation was more uncertain; Mayor Pirozzi has estimated there could still be 15 people unaccounted for. Some of the older residents had grandchildren visiting in the last days of summer.

Away from the TV cameras, the tiny hamlet of San Benedetto, near Amatrice, buried one its sons, 13-year-old Sergio Giustiniani. The Italian geological institute said more than 1,350 aftershocks had hit Italy’s central mountains since Wednesday’s pre-dawn 6.2-magnitude quake.

Al Jazeera’s Sue Turton, reporting from the town of Ascoli Piceno in the Marche region, said there was an “incredibly sorrowful” atmosphere at the funeral.

The first grieving families to bury their dead did so on Friday evening in Pomezia.

Renzi’s government and local authorities are now facing questions as to why there were so many deaths in a sparsely-populated area only a few years after a 2009 natural disaster in the nearby city of L’Aquila left 300 people dead. Hundreds of families were left homeless by the trembler, which hit the area on Wednesday.

Several of those killed were foreigners, including three Britons and up to eight Romanians, thousands of whom are living in the area. Elsewhere, 11 were killed in Accumoli and 49 in Arquato del Tronto.

A young man wept over a little girl’s small white coffin, while a woman nearby gently stroked another white coffin ahead of a state funeral in Italy for some of the victims of the devastating natural disaster that struck a central mountainous area this week.

In the service, Bishop D’Ercole told how a four-year-old girl survived the quake thanks to the embrace of her older sister.

While there is little hope of finding any more survivors, the head of the civil protection agency, Immacolata Postiglione, said the search would continue. Other funerals took place on Friday, with the majority still to come.

“Why attend? To listen to politicians?”

“You had already stopped breathing, but I want you to know up there that we did all we could to get you out of there”. The government has promised to rebuild the region.

But the clear-up operation needed first has been hampered by powerful aftershocks – more than 1,300 since Wednesday – which have closed winding mountain roads, damaged key bridges and made life unsafe for exhausted emergency services.

As powerful aftershocks closed winding mountain roads and made life unsafe for more than 4,000 professionals and volunteers engaged in the rescue effort, survivors voiced dazed bewilderment over the scale of the disaster that struck their sleepy communities.

Renzi has declared a state of emergency and authorized 50 million euros to fund the recovery.

The total rebuilding operation is forecast to cost over a billion euros.