Fifty years ago, the ground began to shake in Poggioreale, an ancient village in the Belìce Valley of south-west Sicily. Calogero Petralia was eating spaghetti with his family, just as he did every Sunday lunch. By the time the initial earthquake and the aftershocks that night had quietened, the house where Petralia was born and raised was gone. It was 15 January 1968 and he was 18 years old. “My heart remained in that room,” he says.

Measuring 6.1 on the Richter scale, the earthquake was one of the most powerful to strike Italy, killing 231 people in the valley, injuring more than 1,000 and leaving as many as 100,000 homeless. Four towns were razed entirely; Poggioreale was one of them.