On this day in 2016, at thirty-six minutes past three in the morning, a magnitude 6.2 earthquake struck central Italy. The epicentre lay near Accumoli, the hypocentre only about four kilometres down, which is very shallow. The shaking was felt in Rome and in Florence. About three hundred people were killed, most of them asleep, in and around Amatrice and Accumoli, and in the hamlets below Arquata del Tronto.

These were towns built of rubble stone: rounded river and mountain stones set in mortar, walls two and three feet thick, raised in courses by masons who worked with what the ground gave them and repaired by their grandsons. That kind of wall carries weight beautifully and resists sideways movement poorly. Streets that had held their line since the Middle Ages were gone by morning. In Amatrice the civic tower was still standing above the wreckage, its clock face turned to the square, and the photographs taken that day show it stopped.

I have no lesson to draw from stone here. Amatrice, Accumoli, Arquata del Tronto, Pescara del Tronto. Three hundred people.