Indian Summer Southern Europe

Our journey starts at 7:30 in Marktl. At 2 o'clock in the afternoon we are already in Venzone. Dave was stationed here after the horrible earthquake in 1976 to help. Today he looks at the city again and tries to rediscover the places of this time.
Venzone is a very nice little old city with a wall arround it.
It is surrounded by high mountains, car free an quiet. Only some tourists are walking arround, taking pictures from the rebuilt houses or sit eating in the restaurant gardens. One destroyed church and fotos in the restaurants remembers you to the disaster of 1976.

Earthquake 1976

On May 6, 1976, the place was almost completely destroyed when at 20:59 an earthquake shook Friuli for 56 seconds. The tremors reached an intensity of VIII to IX on the twelve-level Mercalli scale and were classified as destructive to devastating. In Venzone there were 47 deaths. Already in the first days after the catastrophe, a salvage committee organized the recovery of movable cultural assets. Venzone was badly affected, but not extinguished. The complete destruction of the old town, the ramparts and the cathedral caused an aftershock on September 15, 1976.

The population joined in 1977 to a citizen committee and demanded the complete reconstruction of the village. The responsible ministry was also concerned with a second input: The construction office of the municipality wanted to eliminate all building remnants and let Venzone rebuild with prefabricated elements.

Ultimately, however, the plans of the Citizens Committee were taken.

It was decided not simply to replace the destroyed houses, but to put back all the debris exactly as they were before the catastrophe. In order to implement this project, photos of the place were collected in order to identify individual pieces of wall lying around. It was also decided not to install new facades on the successfully reconstructed sites. Only the places that could not be restored from the rubble were provided with a facade. Thanks to this decision, today visitors to the village can get a picture of the maximum human performance that the inhabitants of Venzone have made in the reconstruction of their town. Even large parts of the cathedral could be reconstructed in this way, the bare walls inside and outside show the losses. In the open Town Hall Palace, a pictorial documentation commemorates the catastrophe and the reconstruction.Read more