On the stage placed right in the center of Piazzale Paoli, which for three years has hosted the installations of the Parco della Memoria, a group of children among the many involved go up to remember the 15th anniversary of the 2009 earthquake: with difficulty they hold up a black and green poster, colors symbolizing the Eagle, black representing mourning, green representing hope. Symbols that are one of the legacies of the terrible earthquake of 1703, but children cannot know this; just as they cannot know much about the very seismic event they are commemorating, other than what parents, relatives and friends have managed to convey to them. On the dark part of the billboard appears the drawing of a group of "rubbish" houses, on the other side there is a group of colorful and stable buildings.
"If they had been able to speak - says one of the little ones into the microphone - these houses would have said to those who lived in them: 'Run away, we are not safe houses!', so many people would have been saved". On stage, drawings, digital works and poems that children and teenagers have created to remember the 309 victims of the L'Aquila earthquake alternate. Their works are an expression of the post-earthquake generation, between Generation Z and Alpha, which has no direct memory of the tragedy. The people that the mayor Pierluigi Biondi defined as "free from such an oppressive past and yet to be helped to make memory the substance of their identity".
The choice of Elisa and Tommaso, two students of the Conservatory born in 2009, as young people designated to light the brazier of memory at the end of the long torchlight procession of the night, was not accidental. "We decided to involve school children and young people - explains Federico Vittorini who lost his mother and sister in the earthquake - because it is from there that the message must start that memory is not something that makes you cling to the past but is instead a spring towards the future".
L'Aquila has 8,440 very young people in the 0-14 age group (12%) which becomes approximately 11,500 if the 15-19 group is included. Hundreds participated in the anniversary events or were involved in prevention initiatives as hoped for by the head of Civil Protection himself, Fabrizio Curcio.
A collective memory that also passes through sport, with the match at the 'Tommaso Fattori' stadium between the Italy and England Under 19 rugby national teams and the youth tournaments, while the L'Aquila football fans wrote on a banner: "Of that night cursed we pass on history, children of this land, custodians of memory".
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