ROME – A landslide took a cemetery to the edge of a cliff in the Ligurian region of northern Italy, spreading about 200 coffins and bodies over a hillside and in the Mediterranean Sea.
The divers managed to recover 12 coffins from the sea on Wednesday after the landslide in the town of Camogli, some 13 kilometers north of Portofino, two days earlier. Most of the cemetery coffins were scattered around and under the rubble caused by the landslide.
Relatives of people who had been buried in the cemetery gathered in the main square of the seaside town to receive news and protest what they considered negligence from local authorities.
“It was the only place where I could go and see my parents and talk to them,” said Clara Terrile, 66, a shoe store owner in Camogli, in a telephone interview on Wednesday, “now I have nothing left.”
The landslide was probably caused by the erosion of the cliff beneath the cemetery, aggravated by storms that have hit the fragile Ligurian coast in recent years, according to Italy’s National Council of Geologists.
“This event touched the community emotionally,” said Francesco Olivari, mayor of Camogli. “The whole of Liguria is characterized by these phenomena, it was difficult to predict,” he said.
The landslide, which occurred along the coast of Genoa, where a bridge collapsed in 2018, killing 43 people, generated outrage in Italy over the lack of infrastructure maintenance and the prevention of natural disasters. Prosecutors in Genoa opened an investigation into the collapse of the cemetery.
“This is Italy, even the dead cannot rest in peace,” said one person lamented on twitter.
The slide shows “the lack of maintenance that we geologists have been denouncing for years,” said Domenico Angelone, secretary of the National Council of Geologists, in a statement. Despite their “high social, moral and cultural value”, cemeteries are often built in unstable locations and in recent years have suffered “lack of attention”, he added.
The city started to work to solidify the cliff next to the cemetery and, in the last days, the area was closed after the authorities noticed cracks and heard some “creaks”, Mr. Olivari, the mayor, said. Some residents protested, saying that they had been reporting cracks and problems with the cemetery structure for years.
Lilla Mariotti, a resident of Camogli, posted on Facebook a photo of cracks in the cemetery walls that she said she sent to the mayor in 2012. “I never received any response,” she wrote.
Terrile said he wrote to the city in 2007 reporting cracks in front of his father’s grave, but he also never received an answer. In 2019, she reported more cracks and the city fixed them, she said. A few weeks ago, on a visit to the cemetery, she noticed that the same cracks had reappeared.
“I hope my parents are among the bodies they found,” she said, “I don’t even have a place where I can bring flowers anymore.”
Olivari, the mayor, said the city had established psychological support for affected families.
The regional authorities asked for help from the national rescue services, since the search for coffins and corpses depended on security on the cliff, which was in danger of further collapse.
For now, divers can only rescue coffins floating in the sea, since most of the others are buried under the rubble of the landslide, said Giacomo Giampedrone, the main regional civil protection officer.