The Weight of Snow

«The darkness in which we were immersed became black. The final voices were those of two gentlemen whose cry for help came from somewhere left of the sofa. They shouted in vain; a beam creaked and another pile of snow fell to the ground. "Mommy, why isn’t anyone coming to save us?" "I don’t know." "Have they found us..." "I don’t know." "You mean they can’t hear us?" "Of course they hear us. Maybe they are tired, Gianfi. They must have been digging for ages. Let’s let them rest for a moment, maybe sleep a couple of hours. Then they’ll find us. We fine, right?" "Actually I'm dying of cold, mom." "Well, it's normal ... We're in the mountains." "Ludovica?" "She is certainly fine too, Gianfilippo." "Yeah ... Mom?" "Yes?" "Would you like to say a prayer with me?"» Adriana and Gianfilippo Parete are mother and son. It is January 18, 2017, and they are about to die along with the other twenty-nine people trapped between the ruins of the Rigopiano hotel. During a brief earthquake in the heart of Abruzzo, an avalanche broke off from Mount Siella and submersed a small hotel resort at the bottom of the valley. In a second, 120,000 tons of stones, ice and snow swept away everything in its tracks. Some were instantly killed, but many died in slow agony. Because of the storm and miscommunication, aid was delayed, emergency workers could not reach the valley, and so the rubble of the Rigopiano hotel turned into a death trap.

The story of what really happened during The dramatic fifty hours that followed the avalanche is told by the Parete family, the four protagonists of what the newspapers called the "Rigopiano miracle".