ITALY: Reconstruction

The 30th anniversary of King Vittorio Emanuele’s reign, celebrated last week at Rome, and Prime Minister Benito Mussolini’s 47th birthday, enthusiastically observed at Milan, was chosen by the Italian Cabinet as the day on which to announce its appropriation toward rebuilding the houses demolished fortnight ago when temblors cracked Italy’s ankle from Naples to Bari (TIME, Aug. 4). One hundred million lire ($5,260,000) was set aside for the erection of several hundred “anti-seismic”* houses in the devastated region, for destroying uninhabitable dwellings, for shoring up those which are salvageable.

The King having returned from three days of motoring through rubble-strewn villages, much of the relief work having been curtailed as unnecessary, the government’s chief problem lay in trying to persuade inhabitants to return to their homesites. Not only the fresh and fearful recollection of over 2,000 killed and twice as many injured, but the fact that the torn earth still quivered ominously from time to time made the villagers of Melfi, Puglia, Avellino, Ariano skeptical about going home prematurely.

Meantime, effective local measures were taken toward reconstruction. Straying cattle were rounded up to await their owners, residents of the vicinities most damaged were assured that there would be a postponement of tax collections. In some neighborhoods moratoriums were declared on private obligations. Orphans and the aged homeless were packed off to urban asylums.

Minister of Public Works Araldo Di Crollalanza was able to report to his Chief that “the relief organization is functioning smoothly.”

*Most famed “anti-seismic” building is the Imperial Hotel at Tokyo, the creation of Architect Frank Lloyd Wright, which successfully withstood the 1923 quake. Its foundations are insloping, not vertical.