Earthquake victims buried as villagers find unity in grief

The victims of the earthquake in San Giuliano di Puglia, including a class of six-year-olds, went to their graves yesterday as survivors in the southern Italian hill village remembered their short lives and appealed to the authorities to prevent similar tragedies.

The funeral for the 29 victims of Thursday's tremor was simple, melancholic and intimate, befitting this small, close community of 1,200 people.

The great and the important arrived by helicopter – President Carlo Ciampi and his wife, the President of the Chamber of Deputies, the Minister of the Interior. But neither they nor the television cameras, roaming among the faces, could alter or trivialise the essential meaning of the rite: a community closing ranks in an extremity of grief, burying with the children whatever differences they had until last week held among themselves.

The service was led by Bishop Tommaso Valentinetti from the city of Termoli. He said of the 26 dead children: "These angels are gazing from the vault of Heaven. We want to ask a favour of them, an intercession: send from the sky your consolation for the parents. Comfort them, dear little ones, you who have already seen the vault of Heaven, you who can make communion with the angels."

The ceremony was held under white canopies in open space next to the sports hall, just beyond the village. The hall has become a focus of grief since 29 coffins arrived there on Friday for a lying-in period.

The outside wall was a mass of white flowers yesterday. Wreaths of white, yellow and pink poured into the village from all over Italy and from as far away as Australia.

The silence with which the ceremony opened was pierced by the cries of one mother. Another, sobbing helplessly, flung herself on to her child's coffin.

A choir from a nearby village provided the music, accompanied by violin and off-key guitar. It was plangent and rustic, rising into the brown fields above.

Concluding the service, the mother of Luigi, one of the child victims, offered up a prayer – not to God but to the authorities. "I ask only one thing," she said, "that our school be made strong. I ardently wish that no other mothers or fathers should have to cry for their children as we have cried."

San Giuliano's burden is compounded because the villagers are homeless. They spent the night after the tremor in cars or under street lamps. Now they are accommodated in tents and caravans, but the nights are growing chilly.

The authorities have pledged more solid buildings quickly. After visiting the injured at a hospital in the town of Larino, President Ciampi affirmed the village would be provided for. "They must remain," he said. "We have provided immediate help, and have assured them they will return."

But the plea of the mother of Luigi remains the most important and the most difficult to fulfil. The daily La Repubblica has revealed that a report in Febru-ary declared that more than half of Italy's schools lacked the legally required certificate that they could withstand earthquakes. Nearly three-quarters were not adequately protected against fire.

Meanwhile, Giuseppe La Serra, the engineer who two years ago built new classrooms on top of San Giuliano's nearly 50-year-old school – structures that have been blamed for the building's collapse – insisted that his work conformed to regulations.

"I think about those children who died," he said. "I think about them continuously, and I haven't slept for days."