I hope when those little towns are rebuilt (and they will be, Italians are stubborn when it comes to home), they adopt some reinforcing that will make the toll in the next quake much smaller, maybe even zero.

The absolute worst structure to be in is unreinforced masonry. It looks picturesque but it's deadly when Mother Earth turns over in her sleep.

but the news said, "no reports of damage or injuries."
That is sad.

to any sort of standards to resist earthquakes, this is a relatively low death toll, even though it will no doubt still rise.

On the west coast of this country, they've learned a lot from earthquakes over the years and have pretty substantial building codes in place. The rest of the country, not so much. If any one of the other places (New Madrid, for instance) were to break loose, the destruction and death toll would be horrendous.

For those interested, I can heartily recommend On Shaky Ground by John Nance. It came out in 1988, and I first read it on the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Quake in Alaska, which happened on March 27, 1964. The book starts out, more or less with the Good Friday earthquake, and later on has several chapters about the New Madrid Quakes of 1811-12. Certainly, many earthquakes have happened since that book, but the essential information and understanding of plate tectonics has merely been refined, not drastically altered. It's an excellent book, and I'd encourage anyone interested in these things to read it.

Most buildings in Amatrice dated from the medieval era. This region (the Apennine Mountains) is apparently prone to earthquakes but not always so devastating. Per Wiki, the last earthquake to cause major damage there occurred in 1639. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amatrice

There have been aftershocks since the main event. http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eventpage/us10006gee#executive

I've always been fascinated by things like earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunamis, and other natural phenomena. On Shaky Ground is simply the best book I've ever read about earthquakes.

Nance also wrote a book about the first bankruptcy of Braniff Airlines, Flying Colors, which is the best such airline book I've everc read. He long ago switched to writing fiction, and while I've enjoyed those books, I wish he'd go back to non fiction.

Supreme Court case about lost property. The quake in New Madrid was so strong that it elinated whole plots of land from existence

to all the soul's lost, the wounded and their families.