There’s no place like home

The warming smell of mocha coffee wafts through the three-bedroom apartment in St Elia as a family that had been living in a hotel for six months start moving their furniture in.

For Ħamrun-born Nathalie Cinque it is a new chapter in life. Everything feels new and everyday things have become exciting.

“When I put the mocha cafeteria on the stove last Thursday, it felt like I was doing something new,” she said, her Maltese tinged with a slight Italian accent acquired after 24 years living in L’Aquila.

Tonight will mark six months since Mrs Cinque and her family, like thousands of other Abruzz­esi, were chased out of their fifth floor apartment in the picturesque city of L’Aquila by a mammoth earthquake that flattened large parts of the region. They had to walk over fallen books and shattered plates to get out of the flat and into their two cars, even forgetting the bag with blankets, water and some bars of chocolate that Mrs Cinque had prepared a few days before following months of tremors in the area.

The earth still seems unwilling to settle down and the earth still shakes sporadically.

“There was a tremor just last Monday but I was walking and didn’t feel it,” Mrs Cinque said, sounding as if it was nothing out of the ordinary.

But she admitted that the fear of another big quake was with her night and day. “Before I go to sleep, I hope that there won’t be another one. Whenever I feel something move, I jump. I think this will affect us for a long time,” she said, adding that it was impossible to get rid of the foreboding thought.

But her apprehension was tinged with excitement last week as the family moved into the three-bedroom apartment at 126 Via Collevernesco, a big step up from the one room she had been sharing with her husband Angelo and two sons, 23-year-old Adriano and Simone, 20, in a hotel in Montesilvano, a coastal town an hour’s drive from L’Aquila. They were eventually given a second room but it was still a far cry from having their own place.

“Just boiling pasta and making sauce is exciting,” she gushed about the apartment in Sant Elia, just two kilometres from L’Aquila, into which they moved last Thursday aided by an Italian government subsidy.

“We can finally start picking up the pieces.”

This year she had to forgo her annual trip to visit her family and friends in Malta, who kept her morale up with letters and phone calls. “I felt I would be abandoning my family at a difficult time.”

They still cannot return to their own home in Via Montematese. “It needs structural works because the lower floors are not in good shape,” she said.

Last week Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi said the picturesque city of L’Aquila would be restored within seven years. People have started moving back home but the Cinques are still far back on the list. “Maybe within a year...” she said pensively.

Although the Italian government was offering alternative housing to dispersed people, Mrs Cinque wants to go back to the apartment into which she had moved as a young bride 24 years ago and where her children were brought up. After all, there is no place like home.