White and red, a Pozzuoli, are the colors of damage. They can be seen on the warning tapes in Piazza a Mare limit access to the tents only to the occupants and civil protection personnel. They can be seen in every wounded corner of the city, wherever there is a vacant building or sinkhole caused by a water leak. White and red are the colors chosen to contain the danger, even when it comes to pieces of plaster that look like stones, mixed with rough dust on the floors of the entrance halls of the damaged buildings, on the sidewalks or in the streets. They report cracks and fissures, now also visible from the outside. Two colors that separate the city: the exhausted one from the more resilient one. After the seismic swarm on Monday evening, following the damage reported by the 4.4 magnitude earthquake, Pozzuoli appears with a double skin. Some buildings have stripped themselves of their newest appearance, giving up colored plaster to show the soul still in tuff, while others remain as they were: unharmed and earthquake-proof.
The night between Friday and Saturday, from 2.58 am, Pozzuoli, however, began to tremble again. This time he had the strongest shock magnitude 2.7, with epicenter at a depth of 2 kilometers. “They always come at night,” the citizens report. Almost like the monster in childhood fairy tales, who waits for evening to come out into the open. Maybe so, or maybe at night they feel more vulnerable and they live the fear of fear itself, the one that makes you go to sleep with your clothes on or with an already full bag near the front door. They have never stopped “dancing”, as the citizens of Pozzuoli say, but now we continue with a wounded city. The civil protection tents they appear like a plaster for those who are afraid of returning to a damaged but not yet checked home.
«After the last shock my house is full of cracks and I’m afraid to go back. They told me that there are over 800 reports and we have to wait our turn”, he explains Maria Nappi resident in Viale Bognar. From the tent city in via Vecchia delle Vigne, however, Angela shows the eviction order and a sheet issued to her on Friday, at Palatrincone by Municipality operators, with an identification number to obtain temporary accommodation. Her house is a few meters away and there fear of acts of profiteering is added to that of bradyseism. “We went down to intimidate some kids who were riding around on scooters and who were intending to enter our houses,” says the citizen.
If you look closely, however, between white and red there is also a third color that invades Pozzuoli: blue. It is not only that of the sea which, albeit timidly now, continues to wash its coasts; blue is the color of the civil protection tents, of its operators and volunteers who stay there even at night to support those who rest on the camp beds inside. Blue is the color of the paving of the fields of the Sandro Pertini seafront, where children can be seen skating. And this is how, among the tents of civil protection, resilience, in Pozzuoli, runs on roller skates.
