Walking through the smashed rubble of the Italian town of Amatrice last week, the Milanese engineer Devis Sonda saw heartrending and familiar sights: limestone boulders spilled into the road, bricks and mortar crushed to powder, heavy concrete ceilings pancaked into floors below, the last desperate days of the Vigil del Fuoco search for remaining trapped survivors in the shadow of rumpled Apennine ridges standing impassively by.
He and his colleagues had seen this before—in L’Aquila in 2009, in Emilia-Romagna in 2012.