by the editorial staff of Il Sarto delle Lumache
There are places that carry two birthdays.
Martirano Lombardo, a small village in the mountains of Calabria, in southern Italy, is one of them. The first birth happened sometime in the Roman era — perhaps earlier. The second happened on the morning of September 9, 1905, when the earth stopped shaking and nothing remained of the old town.
The earthquake of September 8, 1905 was one of the most devastating seismic events in twentieth-century Italy. It struck the heart of Calabria with a magnitude estimated between 6.8 and 7.1. In a few seconds, Martirano — an ancient borough with two thousand years of history, a Norman cathedral, a bishop’s seat since 1058 — was reduced to rubble.
Two thousand people lost everything.
A new town, a new name
What happened next is a story that is rarely told outside Calabria.
In the years following the earthquake, the Italian state and the northern provinces organized one of the most remarkable acts of solidarity in modern Italian history. The provinces of Lombardy — Milan, Brescia, Bergamo and others — financed the reconstruction of the destroyed village. A new town was built from scratch, on a different site, among oaks and chestnut trees.
In 1929, the new village officially took the name Martirano Lombardo — Lombardo, in honor of the northern regions that had made its rebirth possible.
It was a name sewn into stone. A permanent act of gratitude.
The silence that followed
For over a century, this story remained largely untold. There was no comprehensive historical account of what happened between 1905 and 1929 — no book that reconstructed the seismic event, the emergency response, the choice of the new site, the conflicts between the old and new communities, or the slow process of building a new identity.
The archives existed. The parish records, the prefectural documents, the diocesan files, the family memories passed down through generations — they were there, waiting.
Nobody had assembled them into a single narrative.
Born Twice
In March 2026, that silence was finally broken.
Born Twice: The Story of Martirano Lombardo is the first comprehensive historical account of the founding of Martirano Lombardo after the 1905 earthquake. Written by Clemente Ernesto Aiello — a historian, author and musician born in Martirano Lombardo in 1959 — the book draws on years of archival research to reconstruct a story that belongs not only to one village, but to the broader history of southern Italy and its relationship with the rest of the country.
The book does not stop at 1907, when the new town was built. It carries the story forward to the present day: the slow depopulation that reduced the village from 2,361 inhabitants in 1951 to fewer than one thousand today, the missed opportunities, and the resources — historical, environmental, human — that still make a new renaissance possible.
From the Roman origins of the legendary Mamertum to the Norman diocese of 1058, from the castle of Roger II to the earthquake of 1905, from the solidarity of reconstruction to the challenge of depopulation: two thousand years of history in a single volume.
For the diaspora
Today, more people of Martirano Lombardo origin live outside the village than inside it. In Melbourne and Sydney, in Chicago and Toronto, in Zurich and Stuttgart — the children and grandchildren of those who left carry a name and often little else.
This book was written for them too.
It is a way of knowing where you come from. Of understanding why a place carries two names, two founding dates, two souls.
Born Twice is available on Amazon in paperback and Kindle editions.
Leggi questa storia in italiano: Martirano Lombardo: come nasce un paese dopo un terremoto.
Il Sarto delle Lumache is a slow-journalism literary magazine focused on contemporary southern Italy and Calabria. We tell stories that take time to be told.
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