Ascoli, August 23, 2026 – There are losses that time cannot make lighter. For Patrizia Marano, August 24, 2016 is not just a date etched in the memory of the Central Italy earthquake: it is the day when, in a few seconds, she lost her entire family. Under the rubble of Pescara del Tronto remained her husband Alberto, her son Tommaso, just 14 years old, her parents, and her brother-in-law. She survived after being buried for many hours.
Ten years after that night, Patrizia, who is the president of the association of victims’ families ‘I stand with Pescara del Tronto’, chooses to address directly the Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni. She does so with an open letter that is both a memory, a request to be heard, and an appeal so that reconstruction does not lose sight of the people.
“The night of August 24, 2016 my life stopped under the rubble – she writes –. I lost my son Tommaso, my husband Alberto, my parents, my brother-in-law, and many friends.” When she was rescued, she recounts, “the world I knew no longer existed”: there was no longer family, home, village, and a part of herself. In her story, the images of those terrible hours return: “Death, people desperately searching for their loved ones, destruction, the silence after the screams, the dust of the rubble entering the lungs.” An experience that, for Marano, also carries a responsibility: to continue speaking for those who that night did not return home.
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Pescara del Tronto is especially the focus of the appeal. Ten years after the earthquake, Marano writes, “I struggle to recognize the place that for me meant home, family, memory, and life“. And she adds: “I see a stretch of land where there were once people, voices, children, houses, streets, and relationships. Ten years is a huge part of a person’s life and for those who lost everything the wait is not just a delay: it is a pain that continues”.
She does not ask the Prime Minister for the impossible. “I do not ask her to give me back what I lost, because I know no one can do that. I ask her to listen to those who remained and to look at what is left of Pescara del Tronto with the eyes of someone who knows that behind every destroyed house there was a family and behind every name engraved in memory there was a life. I choose to address this letter to her as a woman to a woman, I would like her to come to Pescara del Tronto not only to commemorate those who are no longer here, but to meet those who remain. This is not only my story – concludes Patrizia Marano –. It is that of a wounded community still seeking the strength to start over. Pescara del Tronto is there, its dead are there, its survivors are there”.
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