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Near Miss by Ken Gambier We were on a cultural tour of Italy, visiting Venice, Florence, Rome and other places along the way. On Friday 26 September my wife and I in a party of 47 from Britain arrived at Assisi to visit the tomb of St Francis. Our visit was due to start at 11.00am but our tour manager could not find the local guide, a friar at the monastery. He took us on a long walk through the medieval town and we eventually caught up with the friar outside the 13th century basilica, just after 11.30am. It was explained there had been an earthquake during the night and the friar had been delayed by this. The friar asked us to gather around him and had said only a few words of greeting when the ground started to shake under our feet, lasting about five seconds. He told us it was another earthquake and we looked up at the basilica where small pieces of masonry were falling off and a cloud of dust was billowing out of the door. An Italian woman nearby was in hysterics but most people were very stoical about it, not fully appreciating the seriousness of the situation. Most took photos or videos of the dusty doorway. The tour manager and the friar decided the visit should be terminated and we walked back to the coach. This was through narrow streets lined by tall buildings and along the way there were many pieces of masonry and plaster which had fallen into the road. My wife picked up a fist-sized souvenir which would have killed a person standing under when it fell. There was no official instruction from police or monastery authorities and people continued to come into the town and walk towards the basilica. Later, when we saw news bulletins on TV and read newspaper reports, we learnt that four people had been killed in the basilica and others injured by that 11.40am earthquake which registered 5.8 on the Richter scale. They were friars and art experts who had been assessing the damage from the earlier earthquake at 3.30am and were buried when a ceiling collapsed. According to our tour programme, we should have been in the basilica at 11.40am. We shall never know whether the friar was preparing to take us in or whether he was about to say that it was unsafe. Either way, it was a near miss. First published in VISA issue 27 (winter 1998) |