Temporary villages corresponded to practical needs, but - at the same time - met emotional impulses and respected deep cultural values. The refusal to leave at one's native setting, to detach the identity that places and lifestyles had cemented, was a motivation that agreed with the need to keep in place the necessary workforce to rebuild the houses and to resume the production activities.

The quality of the prefabricated homes, their symmetried layout - forty years after the earthquake - show the rationality of the plan according to which have been chosen and placed. The renewed countries reveal in comparison a sort of anarchy. Every family has built according to its own project and to a personal idea of well-being and modernity. The homogeneity of the tradition, celebrated by decades of research on the "country house", has been deleted.

The emergence of the one-family villa underlines two facts: householders were the actors of the reconstruction; individual energies allowed to reactivate settlements that in its original form would not meet the modern needs of life.

In order to understand the birth of villages that insist on areas of tradition, but which do not share features and functions, it should go over the plan according to which they have been set and the process that has made them possible.

To redo a home damaged or destroyed by the earthquake, householders presented to the mayor, chief official of the Region, a project. This had to be approved by the technicians of the General Secretariat, which according to simple and clear rules approved repairs and renovations. If individuals were wanted to expand housing sizes exceeding the limits, they would face from their own pockets additional costs while resorting to subsidized loans.

Understanding better the time, it should be remembered that many inhabitants of the areas hit by the earthquake were familiar with building techniques; also building rules were less restrictive than nowadays. The commitment of the individuals which undoubtedly accelerated the timing of reconstruction could be summed up in iconic form by the cement mixer that - if not exactly common, but certainly significant - was sent into earthquake areas after factory hours. The proximity between temporary and permanent villages, between temporary villages and industrial companies maintained the commitment of the reconstruction of houses and factories, clutched in their development goals which could not be split. The abolition of the rural building that usually accompanied the house, in fact marks the end of traditional agriculture as the integration of the work abroad or at home.

A story that could be based on topographic traces of the event, it must neglect the uncertainties and anxieties of the period because it favors the last aspect of the recovery. While the sight can imply the intervention of the political groups and opinion, it cannot recall backwardness of living conditions that characterized most of the damaged towns and villages. For many the new homes radically changed the way of life, they represented a milestone of unexpected wellbeing. The benefit was extended even to those who had emigrated and were residing permanently abroad. They were offered the opportunity to establish themselves as second home owners in the very place from which they had departed, leaving only ruined and abandoned walls. The cars with French number plates that - for example - were all too evident in Forgaria in the summer of the Eighties were emblematic in this regard.

General overdimensioning of the reconstruction depends on the social complexity of the forces. The breadin of the financial resources resolved conflicts that the different needs of political parties and public opinion had and would advance. The tensions that citizens with fewer resources and supporters of the cultural values of the village could generate were generated by granting to all the possibility of repair or reconstruction of the earthquake-affected homes.

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