Giuseppe Platania
In Catania I saw my friend Lieutenant Giuseppe Platania, who was quartered in Messina during the winter of 1908-9. He was away for Christmas and returned about midnight on the 27th December and went to bed at two in the morning on the 28th. He was awakened by the falling of a picture, which hit him. He guessed the reason, covered his head with the pillows and lay still, waiting. He had to wait fifty-seven seconds—at least many people told me the earthquake lasted fifty-seven seconds, but the recording instruments were broken, so it is not certain how long it lasted. When the room left off rocking, Giuseppe put out his hand for the match-box, but the table was no longer by his bedside. He heard cries for help, and a man who was sleeping in the next room came with a light, then he saw that the floor of his room had fallen, but not under his bed, which was in a corner. He and the man with the light managed to get to the window and let themselves down into a side street, but they saw no way out because the exit was closed by the fallen houses. Their window was on the first floor and they climbed back into the house, helped another man who was there, got themselves some clothes and returned into the side street. Here they felt no better off and were afraid of the houses falling on them, but Giuseppe’s soldier servant, Giulio Giuli, a contadino of Nocera, appeared among them. He had come to look for his master and crept through the ruins into the side street. He told them that Messina was destroyed, which they would not believe; everyone seems to have supposed at first that the earthquake had only damaged his own house. Giulio showed them the way out, and so they got into the town and realised the extent of the disaster. If Giulio had not come, Giuseppe and his friends would probably have been destroyed by more houses falling into their narrow street before they could have found a way out.
Giuseppe had changed his bedroom about ten days previously. The house he used to live in was completely destroyed, he showed me a photograph of its ruins. His mother and his brother Giovanni, in Catania, heard of the disaster, but could get no particulars because communication was broken. Giovanni went to Messina to inquire for his brother, not knowing where his new room was, but he knew the number of his regiment. He stopped a soldier in the street who was wearing the number in his cap and who told him where to find Giuseppe. In the meantime Giulio had walked about fifteen miles to Alì, whence he took the train to Catania, told the mother her son was safe, and returned to Messina to help in the work of rescuing victims.
Giuseppe directed his soldiers in the rescue work and afterwards received a medal “Per speciali benemerenze.” While at work they saw a hand among the ruins and began to dig round it, all the time in fear lest the disturbing of the rubbish might make matters worse for the victim and for themselves. The hand belonged to a woman whose head had been protected by being under a wooden staircase. She showed no sign of life and it was already four days since the disaster. They wetted her lips with marsala and poured some into her mouth and thus restored her. Giuseppe told me that nothing made more impression on him than seeing this woman’s breast begin to heave as life returned.
The soldiers had to shoot the horses and dogs for eating the corpses, and the thieves for pilfering. The horses had escaped from their stables, which were broken by the earthquake, and the dogs had come in from the country. And besides the pilfering they told me of other things the doing of which had better be ignored by those who seriously cultivate the belief that civilisation and education have already so transformed human nature that all restraints may be safely removed, things which, nevertheless, were done by human beings in Messina while the houses were tottering during the closing days of 1908 and the opening weeks of 1909. I inquired whether the townspeople were themselves guilty of these horrors and they said: No. The bad things were done by people who came into the city from the country, like the dogs, and across the straits from Calabria to take advantage of the catastrophe. As my friend Peppino Fazio in Catania put it:
“The earthquake was very judiciously managed; it killed only the wicked townspeople; it did not touch the good ones, they all escaped.”
Giuseppe’s brother, Giovanni Platania, is a scientific man and a professor; he went often from Catania to Messina during the early part of 1909 to study the behaviour of the sea during the earthquake—the maremoto. He has embodied the results of his researches in an opuscolo on the subject Il Maremoto dello Stretto di Messina del 28 Dicembre 1908 (Modena. Società Tipografica Modenese, 1909). It took him twelve hours to return to Catania from one of his first visits; the journey in ordinary times is performed by the express in two hours and a half. There was no charge for the tickets because it was the policy of the authorities to empty the town; in this way malefactors who escaped from the prison got easily away. In the train was a woman who talked, saying that no one could blame her for travelling to Catania free, especially as she had not deserved to be put in prison—she had been put there for nothing. There was also a man who did not exactly say he was a thief, but he informed his fellow-travellers that the bundle he had with him had been confided to his care by the padrone of his house. There was no reason why he should have told them this, no one had asked him about his bundle, and Giovanni drew his own conclusions.