Reporting from L'Aquila, Italy — If the earthquake that killed 300 people here in April was the injury, then the Group of 8 summit underway in this ravaged town is surely the insult -- at least in the eyes of plenty of its inhabitants.
While builders scrambled to get suitable facilities ready for the onslaught of world leaders and journalists, thousands of local residents made homeless by the temblor continue to live miserably in tent camps.
While workers opened a new airport in record time for the visiting VIPs, quake victims still have no idea when L'Aquila's historic city center might be repaired and life creep back into what has become a virtual ghost town.
And while the likes of President Obama and Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi chew on weighty issues of climate change and the ongoing political crisis in Iran, residents like Federica Tomassino wonder about such basics as their homes, jobs and schools.
"I don't think there'll be time at the G-8 to talk about any of this," Tomassino, 25, said Thursday, her voice dripping with sarcasm.
The anger she and many others in this scenic, hilly region of central Italy feel wasn't part of the script for the confab of the Group of 8 industrialized nations, which kicked off Wednesday and concludes Friday.What Berlusconi had expected was gratitude, a sense of appreciation of his decision to move the meeting to L'Aquila from its original venue in Sardinia in a show of solidarity with quake victims.
But many of those victims say they could use a bit less symbolic solidarity and a lot more direct action in righting their lives and the communities upended by the magnitude 6.3 temblor. Three months later, about 25,000 people still live in tent cities in the region, and an even greater number remain housed in campsites and hotels on the Adriatic Sea.
"Yes we camp," protesters spelled out in big, white letters on a hillside this week, riffing on Obama's campaign slogan, "Yes we can." The message was plainly visible in the Mediterranean sunshine to the leaders and journalists converging on L'Aquila for the G-8 summit.
"People live under the impression that the reconstruction is going well and that most of us already live in houses. This is not true," said Mattia Lolli, a member of 3.32, a new residents' association whose name commemorates the time that the earthquake struck.
