Sr Caterina was praying with
the eight nuns of her Benedictine order in the central Italian town of
Norcia when the earth began to roar. The ceiling cracked and crumbled.
A cupboard crashed to the ground.
Stepping to the door, Sr Caterina caught a glimpse of how the Sunday-morning earthquake was being experienced in the town below.
“Smoke, and people’s cries of fear. If I close my eyes, I cannot help but relive it,” she recalled.
But once the 72-year-old nun saw that her fellow sisters were unharmed and the abbey’s prayer room was still standing, she turned to her safe haven - her faith - and led the nuns back to prayer, asking that God might “at least save some lives.”
Their prayers, it seems, were granted. No deaths have been reported so far from the quake that hit Norcia and the surrounding region - the third to shake the mountainous region some 100 kilometres northeast of Rome since August.
The latest earthquake - magnitude-6.6, the strongest to hit Italy in 36 years - caused no deaths or serious injuries largely because the most vulnerable city centres had already been closed due to previous damage and many homes had been vacated.
What it did not spare was the nuns' own religious order, razing the basilica that had been built in 1200 on the ruins of a 1st century Roman building, and remodelled several times over the centuries, including the addition of a 14th century bell tower.
Only the facade remains.
“Seeing the basilica collapse was truly sad, like cutting a story: Here it ends. But how do we start again?” said Sr Caterina.