Almost three years after the earthquake, Berengo Gardin went back to L’Aquila to bear witness to the state of a blocked and wounded city, its historic centre pierced by scaffolding and hidden by sheets and beams, its streets, once teeming with sound and life, now deserted. He had first met the city sixteen years earlier, catching the warmth of its people and its extraordinary architecture, and returned to the same places so that the comparison would emerge from the images themselves: a painful but necessary act towards those who live exiled from their own lives in an urban fabric that no longer represents them. What struck him was "the silence in the streets. No one passes. No children playing, no women shopping. Only four abandoned dogs wandering around. I remember Rome, San Lorenzo after the American bombing; I was fourteen and it was the same thing: stray dogs, propped-up houses and this silence of death."