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It was a heartrending tour. In Melfi, soldiers and workmen had been working like mad trying to extricate pretty 20-year-old Giuseppina Bocheppi, pinned under a building, starving but still alive, moaning for help. Just as the royal car entered the village another wall collapsed, killed Giuseppina and one of her rescuers. King Vittorio Emanuele, who had stood helplessly wringing his hands before a similar scene in another village an hour before, burst into tears.
In Aquilonia a hollow-eyed, dejected peasant couple passed the royal car carrying the bodies of their two dead children. Immaculate aides-de-camp leaped quickly from the car to help, but the grief-stricken couple shook their heads. They wanted to bury their children with their own hands.
In one day the Naples army corps alone sent 12,000 rations of bread, 16,000 tins of meat, 7.500 tents, 15,000 blankets into the stricken district. Anxious as Prime Minister Mussolini was to succor his people, he was still more anxious to preserve Italian dignity, pride. Politely but firmly he refused all offers of help from abroad.
Earthquake Zones. Why do earthquakes so often recur in the same places? Writes the erudite Montessus, whose world seismological map is speckled with nearly 160.000 quakes: "The earth's crust trembles almost only along two narrow bands which lie along great circles of the earth, the Mediterranean, or Alpino-Caucasian- Himalayan Circle; and the Circum-Pacific or Ando-Japanese-Malayan Circle." Fifty-three percent of all recorded earthquakes have occurred on the first of these, the Eurasian earthquake belt (see map, p. 23). Neatly tucked in the western end of this belt is much-troubled Naples.
Readers of Bulwer Lytton's The Last Days of Pompeii remember the destruction of ancient Rome's shore resort, by earthquake and eruption of Vesuvius in 63 and 79 A. D. Since then Central and Southern Italy has been shaken by innumerable minor and six major earthquakes. The 1456 quake wiped out 40,000 people in Naples, that of 1626, 70,000 more. In September 1693, 100,000 died in Sicily. Buildings fell and graveyards filled again in 1783. Many an Italian oldster remembers the horror of Messina in 1908. Obscured by War news was the quake of 1915 when 30,000 Italian lives were destroyed. Italian pacifists cried then: "This is God's justice on a bloodthirsty world!"
Scientists divide earthquakes into two main groups, those of volcanic origin (generally local in character), and what they call tectonic earthquakes: slipping and faulting of the earth's crust either from subsurface erosion or (as many now hold) a result of the gravital pull of the sun and moon. Though Vesuvius had been in mild eruption for a fortnight before last week's quake, Italy's greatest seismologist, Professor Giovanni Agamennone, insisted that last week's cataclysm belonged to the latter class:
"Although the quake zone is in a volcanic area, I firmly believe the earthquake was due to tectonic causes, that is, it was the result of the enormous and persistent work of erosion done by the incessant flow of great bodies of underground water. We must absolutely exclude the theory that the quake was due to the present activity of Mount Vesuvius. The volcanic centers in the stricken zone gave not the slightest sign of activity at the time of the quake."