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Amatrice, Aug. 25: The chaos came in the middle of the night. People were screaming and dying in the darkness across Amatrice, a summer getaway in central Italy famous as the birthplace of a pasta dish made with tomatoes and pork cheeks.
It was 3:36am when the 6.2 magnitude earthquake hit, followed by a succession of strong aftershocks - including one nearly as strong an hour later - that flattened houses and buried residents in the rubble.
Amatrice was the worst hit by the quake, which also damaged surrounding towns. As of this morning, the deaths totalled at least 247, officials said.
"Half the town no longer exists," mayor Sergio Pirozzi of Amatrice had told reporters yesterday morning. He might have been too optimistic. By midday Amatrice, a quiet mountain town about 100 miles northeast of Rome, felt more like a ghost town.
Ambulances raced along windy roads clogged with traffic and rubble as rescue teams searched for survivors. Using picks, shovels and hands, they scrabbled through the dust and debris of crumbled homes. They brought in dogs to sniff for the dead and injured.
A soft white dust was still swirling about the rubble piled waist-high in Amatrice. Stunned survivors - some with tear-streaked cheeks, others still wearing pyjamas - wandered through the streets, unsure what to do.
A father, holding a small child, pushed a wobbly stroller piled with plastic bags of clothing over a rocky path. A young girl sobbed into her mobile phone.
"It's all gone, the bar, the house, everything," she said.
The initial quake was comparable in intensity to one in 2009 in the central Abruzzo region that killed more than 300 people.
"The number of missing people is undefined at the moment," Immacolata Postiglione, the head of the emergency unit at Italy's civil protection agency, said at a news conference in Rome.
With a permanent population of about 2,000, Amatrice is a place where people know one another. Many had ties to Rome in one way or another, working there in the winter, running restaurants, bars and hotels, as food has always been part of the town's culture.
"If you closed the restaurants in Rome run by Amatriciani, you'd close half the restaurants," said Maria Prassede Perilli, a resident who had been visiting her sister in Rome when the quake struck.
Perilli said she had rushed back after her husband, Giacomo, called in the middle of the night in a frightened voice, telling her, "There's been a terrible earthquake, you can't even imagine."
Her husband survived, she said, but his sisters and niece did not. The couple's house was crushed. "It's flat, like a book," she said.
For many residents who worked in Rome, August was the traditional month of rest and relaxation. "You had dinners in the piazza, long tables with lots of people, someone would bring out a guitar to sing," Perilli said. "It's the mountain, it's a good place to be."
"Will they ever be able to rebuild this?" Perilli said. "It seems like the end of an era."
Rescue teams representing a spectrum of police and armed forces, civil protection agencies from around the country, as well as medical staff members worked through the day searching for survivors, but more often finding the dead.
"This is positive; as soon as the earthquake struck, people came from all over to help," said Riza Sinani, a nurse from the nearby town of Rieti. "That doesn't happen in every country, this outpouring of humanity and good will."
Several people in Amatrice said the town had been full of tourists who came for the coming weekend's annual Sagra dell'Amatriciana festival, which celebrates Amatrice's native pasta sauce, using cured pork cheek known as guanciale, and grated pecorino cheese. The festival has been cancelled.
As sympathy and offers of support poured in from around the world, Pope Francis led pilgrims at St. Peter's Square in praying for the victims, clutching a rosary in his right hand, and Prime Minister Matteo Renzi went to Rieti.
Renzi praised rescue workers and volunteers and vowed to rebuild - a promise particularly important for Italians still furious about the long delays in reconstruction after the 2009 quake.
The area's most significant monument, the Basilica of Saint Francis of Assisi, was unharmed, as were monuments in the city of Perugia.
"We were saved by a miracle," said Stefania Proietti, the mayor of Assisi, where in 1997 a devastating earthquake caused casualties and extensive damage to the city, destroying frescoes by Giotto and Cimabue in the basilica.
For those in Amatrice, the immediate focus was on essentials: who was alive, and who was dead, or missing.