Gioventu` Duemila

 Opening remarks for the conference -

This is a stone, in fact a rock, it signifies stability it makes us feel secure and we hope that, at least during this conference, it will not move.

I was born in London but I have my roots in Fabriano. For me Italian is my mother tongue and in the true sense of the word because Italian was the  language which my mother spoke to me when I was a child. And it was not only Italian but Fabrianese. So my roots are here.

In these last few days I have been walking in the countryside and I thought about other walks that I have had on these same paths in the mountains. With my grandmother, now dead, with parents, with children now grown, with husbands now divorced and now on my own. People change but these paths are the same, the rocks are the same ones and the mountains do not change.

And I thought of what a fundamental thing it would be if the rocks, the earth, the mountains were not stable, were not unchanging  - for in fact that is what happened in the earthquake  … and that is what moved us all.

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Prologue

Our involvement in earthquake and disaster work began on 26^th September 1997 - my mother’s birthday - when a sizeable shock hit Fabriano our family home town.

We initiated an appeal, an earthquake relief fund and, based on the principles of Youth Support, concentrated our efforts on the children, young people and their families who had lost homes and been traumatised by the experience. Money was raised and distributed amongst the worst hit families. Support came from unexpected sources -  not from big Italian businesses or expatriate Italians - but from ‘senior citizens’ who had enjoyed holidays in the area and from the veteran British soldiers who, like my father, had been sheltered by the people of Fabriano during the second world war.

How Many Friends in London!

Very little publicity had been given to the quake and foreign media had concentrated on the damage to the church in Assisi - a famous tourist attraction. But what of the people? My family spent night after night sleeping out in cars to escape the nocturnal threat of being crushed by fresh quakes - what was the psychological toll?

We decided to conduct a survey in the local schools to gauge the reaction of young people to the traumatic experiences and the results of that study were presented at a conference held in Fabriano in April 2000. This conference was attended by a large contingent of local youth including teenagers who had responded to the questionnaire. Thus youth had a direct voice in our deliberations.