August 2, 1980
Bologna
The second-class waiting room of the central station, twenty-five past ten
A suitcase was left in the second-class waiting room of the central station on the first Saturday of the August holidays, when the station was full of families going to the coast.
It went off at twenty-five past ten in the morning, bringing down the wing of the building and destroying a train standing at platform one.
Eighty-five were killed and over two hundred hurt. The youngest was three, the oldest eighty-six.
The city's buses were taken off their routes and used to carry the dead, because there were not enough ambulances. Taxi drivers worked for nothing all day. Every doctor in Bologna came in.
The station clock was stopped at 10:25 and has been kept there since. The crack in the wall of the waiting room has never been repaired.
The city's buses were used to carry the dead because there were not enough ambulances.