Archive for L’Aquila

More of L’Aquila

Posted in Uncategorized with tags , , on October 12, 2014 by telescoper

At the risk of boring you all with even more pictures of L’Aquila, here are a few more pictures I took with my phone while out and about over the past week.

First, here’s the Gran Sasso Science Institute (GSSI) where our workshop is being held:

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The following sites can all be found within a few minutes’ walk of the GSSI (which is itself just a few minutes from my hotel). In particular there is the historically important Romanesque church of Santa Maria di Collemaggio which dates back to the 13th Century. The façade looks in good nick, although there is evidence of recent repair. However, the back of the church collapsed completely during the 2009 Earthquake and is currently being rebuilt. There is also cracking and significant bowing of the wall on the left hand side, hence the supporting structures.

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Excursion to Sulmona

Posted in Uncategorized with tags , , on October 11, 2014 by telescoper

I’m here on my own over the weekend so I decided to make the most of the lovely weather (it was a sunny 28° C today) and take a small excursion by train. The railway station at L’Aquila is situated on a branch line so the options from here are limited: up or down. I decided to take the “up” line to the town of Sulmona, which is 61km away by train. The ticket cost a mere €4.80 and though the train was a bit old, it was right on time in both directions. The journey time of an hour each way might seem a bit long, but the journey is through rather mountainous terrain and the service is a slow Regionale stopping service so I didn’t expect it to be a quick journey. On arrival I discovered that the Stazione Centrale is in fact pretty far from central but it was a pleasant walk of about half an hour into the small city centre.

Sulmona is famous for two things. One is that it is the birthplace of the poet Ovid who is  remembered by a fine bronze statue in the Piazza XX Settembre. The other famous thing is the Confetti di Sulmona, sugar-coated almonds coloured in such a way to look like oversized Smarties and presented in various disguises, e.g. as flower petals.

The town itself was almost totally destroyed by an earthquake in 1706. That’s a bit of a theme around these parts. You might think people would get fed up living in a place where natural catastrophes happen so regularly, but apparently not. Anyway, quite aside from the fact that many of the buildings are clearly of late eighteenth or early nineteenth century, which is not the case in L’Aquila, the reconstruction of Sulmona has made it a much airier place: the squares are larger and more open, and the streets wider. While the topography around L’Aquila is complex – the town itself sits on a hill surrounded by numerous local maxima, minima and saddle-points –  Sulmona sits in a broad flat plain on which the first and second derivatives behave in a much more sensible fashion.  I have to say that I have found L’Aquila quite oppressive at times during this visit. I don’t believe in ghosts of course, but there is so much evidence of destruction all around that it definitely has something of a haunted atmosphere. It was good to get away to a town whose wounds have healed.

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The Slow Rebirth of L’Aquila

Posted in Architecture with tags , on October 10, 2014 by telescoper

This morning there was a gap in the programme at the workshop I’m attending here in L’Aquila so I took the opportunity to dust off my camera and go for a walk around the town. It’s hard to convey in words the extent of the structural damage you can still see more than five years after the earthquake, so I’ll mainly let the pictures to the talking. What you see here is the rule rather than the exception. To preface the pictures, however, I’ll say that the main square, the Piazza del Duomo, which clearly used to be the hub of the city is a strange place now as most of the buildings around it are so badly damaged as to be unsafe. The few shops and cafes open basically operate out of the ground floor.

L’Aquila isn’t exactly a ghost town – there were quite a few people around last night when I walked back to my hotel after dinner – but it’s clearly a shadow of its former self. Only a few per cent of the properties near the city centre are habitable.

Leading out from the Piazza del Duomo is a labyrinth of narrow streets flanked by tall buildings, and most of the them now also unoccupied. The numerous shops inside the galleries that run alongside the larger thoroughfares are all closed. The earthquake happened in the early hours of the morning so there would not have been many people out and about at that time, but it would have been a terrifying experience to have been caught between rows of buildings shaking, with rubble falling down everywhere.

A couple of things are clear having walked around all morning. One is that if there’s so much work still to be done after 5 years then it will take a very long time indeed for L’Aquila to be rebuilt. You can find the phrase L’Aquila Rinasce all round the city, but if there is to be a rebirth it will be a slow and painful one. The other thing is that there must have been a very drastic triage to decide which buildings to repair and which to simply shore up and leave for later. Many seem to me to be so badly damaged that the only practical option is to knock them down and start again. Only a few are fully restored, most of them key civic institutions, although clearly a lot of work is going on in the historic centre especially on old churches.

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Arrival in L’Aquila

Posted in Biographical, The Universe and Stuff with tags , on October 7, 2014 by telescoper

If you were baffled by yesterday’s post then I hope today’s will explain. Yesterday, after an early morning meeting at the University of Sussex, I took the train to Gatwick Airport and thence a flight to Rome; hence volare. The British Airways Flight to Fiumicino Airport I was on arrived about 8 minutes ahead of schedule at 18.12, and I managed to get my luggage and clear passport control and all that in time to catch the 7pm coach to my present location, the city of L’Aquila, which is in the Abruzzo region, about 65 miles East of Rome. I’ve never made this trip before so I was a bit anxious about finding my way here and indeed it would have been a pain had I not caught the 7pm bus, because that would have meant either waiting for the next one (not until 9.30) or going by an alternative route involving a train and a different coach. As it happened, I needn’t have worried.

I’m here to attend a meeting entitled Multiple Messengers and Challenges in Astroparticle Physics, which is taking place at the Gran Sasso Science Institute. As well as the cosmology sessions, which are directly related to my own research, I’m hoping over the next ten days or so to take the opportunity to catch up on the  wider developments in astroparticle physics.

L’Aquila was badly damaged by an earthquake in 2009 and there was plenty of evidence of repair and reconstruction work still going on. I’ll take a few pictures here and there, but for the time being I’ll just share the view from my hotel window for the enjoyment of any readers back in rainy England…

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