“It is a miracle that she is alive, but I am torn. I have lost one granddaughter and one has lived.” The heartrending words of a distraught grandmother portray the extraordinary nature of the earthquake in Italy. Of course in terms of geology, a tectonic shift is a phenomenon that is as unpredictable as it is extraordinary. And yet two factors have made Italy a case-study in terms of survival and extinction. Sibling affection alone explains how eight-year-old Guilia threw herself onto her four-year-old sister as villages and small towns were wiped off the map in central Italy&’s Pescara del Tronto in the aftermath of last Wednesday&’s 6.2 magnitude earthquake. Guilia was dead by the time rescue teams could reach the sisters, but her unbelievably intrepid response is believed to have saved the life of her sister who, her grandmother said, escaped without any injuries. Guilia and Georgia personify an almost incredible achievement that rescue teams would be proud of, but not many able to claim. While the collapse of buildings and pagodas — as in Myanmar on the same day — can be extensive within a country, it is not often that entire villages, many of them of historic importance, have shuddered down.

 This must be reckoned to be yet another striking feature of the tremblor, next in importance to the casualty figure which touched 241 over the weekend. For all that, overwhelming must be the survival story; another girl, aged ten, was pulled from the rubble by an emergency worker… with bare hands. Two nuns from Albania escaped holding hands and the story of their survival would seem almost fictional. Reports suggest that they took their hands even while the building was falling apart, they ran, and they survived!

Earthquakes happen; survival in the midst of overwhelming devastation is a miraculous happening, no less incredible than the manner in which the town of Amatrice crumbled on Thursday, indeed 24 hours after the tremblor. Italy&’s most favoured pasta dish derives its name from the town, where a large crowd had assembled ahead of this weekend&’s 50th annual festival celebrating “Spaghetti Amatriciana”. Tragically, a part of Italy is no more. The 19th century unification of Italy lapses in the limbo of history. The tragedy deepens the country&’s economic blight over the past several years, and Europe in the wider canvas is bound to suffer the aftershocks, so to speak.