“I remember the sound of the pouring rain that increased more and more and then suddenly the mud casting come down like a fury, like an apocalypse.” 16 years have passed since that October 1 and Angelo Micali, one of the longest -lived inhabitants of the Giampilieri valley has never returned to his house on the Via Puntale, among the few spared by the fury of the mud but still partially interdited.
37 people lost their lives, while hundreds of displaced people destroyed by the mud were, which impetuously devoured everything. From that day nothing has been more as before even if the resilience and courage of the locals was indispensable for the rebirth.
The commemoration of the victims of the flood of Giampilieri, Molino, Altoolia, Briga and Scaletta is not a formal ceremony, but a choral prayer elevated to the sky for the victims of that immense tragedy and also for the many angels of the mud that in the following hours and for days, they spent to soothe pain and loss for what happened.
At the foot of the Madonna delle Grazie in the matrix church of Giampilieri Superiore the community together with the parish priest Don Andrea di Paola, he found himself. To say pain and hope more than a thousand words are the looks, which tell a spirit of unity that arose as a flower in the desert. At the monument, the sound of marked names resounded as a memorial that, said Don Di Paola, recalls that of the Eucharist. From the older to the little ones, from that “unidentified” to the hero Simone Neri, who has chosen to sacrifice his life to save it to others. Thirty -seven Cutters of Campania not to forget, but also to remember the importance of prevention of hydrogeological risk, as the commissioner Massimiliano Minutoli said, present together with his colleague Nino Carreri, the councilors of the first district with the president Alessandro Costa, to the marshal of the local station of the Carabinieri Curcio.
The participation of Gaetano Sciacca, former chief engineer of the Civil Engineer of Messina, on the front line for the rebirth of the village, and Filippo Panarello, former deputy of the Ars, is inevitable. For them who live in Giampilieri, the institutional and civic responsibility merged on the long journey of reconstruction that led to the creation of an exemplary model for the whole nation not only on the structural level.
16 years have passed since that day and the tears of those who remained, was born and raised after the flood, they sprang the valley making it luxuriant and transforming death into life.
