FROM a distance, L'Aquila looked like any other medium-sized Italian city, sprawled across the foothills of the Apennines with its modern apartment blocks and historic centre built in stone. But as I approached last week it became apparent that something was wrong: some buildings had holes in their roofs, others had visible cracks in the walls and some had walls missing, ripped away as if by a bombardment.

A disaster had happened here, revealing Italy's uncomfortable relationship with geological hazard and modernity.

Closer to the centre, entire buildings had collapsed, burying dozens of people in the rubble. At Via Campo di Fossa 6b a six-storey building had come down, killing 26 of its occupants in the most deadly collapse of last Monday's earthquake. Its next-door twin was still standing, with just a few cracks in its external walls.

On Thursday L'Aquila's mayor, Massimo Cialente, declared every building in the city of 70,000 people, visibly damaged or not, unsafe for occupation. Every building that represented the state authority had failed the test: the prefecture, pictured, the seat of regional government that should have been the nerve-centre for emergency planning, was partially collapsed; the modern police headquarters was unsafe and the police chief was operating from a caravan; and, crucially, the structure of San Salvatore Hospital, opened just 15 years ago, had failed, forcing the evacuation of patients in the middle of the night.

The responses of the emergency services, civil protection authorities and volunteers have been swift and generous. The homeless have been housed in swiftly erected tent cities and in hotels on the Adriatic coast. There have been few words of complaint from them, or from the opposition, which has loyally supported the government in a time of national tragedy.

But as the death toll inched towards 300, the first recriminations began to appear in TV discussion programmes and in the press. Why had some buildings collapsed and others survived? Could something not have been done to evacuate residents, given that tremors of ever-increasing strength had been jolting the city for three months?

Some survivors indicated that they would have happily used the tent cities on a voluntary basis if they had been set up before, rather than after, the devastating quake.

Ultimately, though, should an earthquake measuring 6.3 on the Richter scale have proved so destructive?

Franco Barberi, a volcanologist and former head of the civil protection agency, says no. "An earthquake like this in California would not have caused a single death," he told reporters.

What had happened in L'Aquila was understandable, though, because of the country's old and badly built buildings. The inefficiency and lack of foresight in dealing with Italy's well-known earthquake risk was "desolating", Barberi said. "The failure is at all levels. Unfortunately, we are a country that doesn't learn its lessons."

In reality, the controversy had begun even before last Monday's quake struck. It was provoked by amateur scientist, Giampaolo Giuliani, who predicted a major quake would strike the nearby town of Sulmona at the end of March, and called for it to be evacuated. His view was not generally accepted in the scientific community, and he was reported to the police for spreading alarm and denounced as an "imbecile" by Guido Bertolaso, the head of the civil protection agency.

The April 6 earthquake, which could be seen as a vindication for Giuliani's alarm, has given him media notoriety. Bertolaso rightly points out that neither the date nor the location of the warning were exactly right and, had the authorities acted on it, they may well have evacuated residents of Sulmona to L'Aquila, potentially worsening the death toll.

"As far as I'm concerned it's not possible to predict an earthquake," said Giorgio Santamaria, a 54-year-old clerical worker temporarily housed in a blue interior ministry tent on the L'Aquila athletics ground. "The same thing happened in the 1703 earthquake: two or three months of minor tremblors and then the big one." On that occasion more than 3000 people died and almost all the city's churches were destroyed.

Santamaria said his 17-year-old daughter was now afraid to go into a building. "It was just too terrifying and seemed to go on for ever. It's something I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy," he said of the quake that woke his family in the middle of Monday night.

The daunting task of making the country safe from any repetition of the catastrophe now falls to the politicians.

Silvio Berlusconi, the prime minister, has responded to the emergency with consummate skill, cancelling a visit to Russia to tour the earthquake zone and overseeing the government's initial response. He has been filmed and photographed surveying the scene from a helicopter and comforting the homeless while wearing a fireman's helmet, and visibly moved at the state funeral of 205 of the victims on Friday.

His jovial suggestion that the homeless should look on their time under canvas as a camping trip caused indignation among the earthquake victims, but probably had little impact on Italians as a whole, who have become inured to his well-meaning but insensitive remarks.

The upshot so far has been to bolster his image as a solicitous father of the nation, capable of resolving the needs of the earthquake victims with his hands-on, can-do approach, just as he solved the Naples refuse crisis. All the while the opposition has been left mute, relegated to virtual irrelevancy.

Berlusconi has even offered to put up some of the homeless in his own, not inconsiderable, private residences.

But it may not be that simple. According to recent reports, the Naples garbage crisis has been more concealed than resolved. And Berlusconi's laissez-faire approach to the economy may not be what is needed when it comes to housing safety. The prime minister was embarrassed when it emerged last week that a proposed law allowing homeowners to enlarge their properties without applying for planning permission - intended to boost the sluggish economy - contained no mention of seismic risk. A clause on safety provisions was hastily added.

Berlusconi has insisted he will press on regardless with a project to span the Straits of Messina with a massive suspension bridge, despite the high risk of earthquakes in the area and the urgent need for funds to pay for reconstruction in earthquake-shattered Abruzzo.

One of the major contractors for the bridge is Impregilo, a company that was involved in completing the wrecked San Salvatore Hospital - though not responsible for erecting the original structure - and is on trial in Naples for alleged violations in the way it processed the Campania region's trash.

Magistrates in L'Aquila, whose own courthouse collapsed in the quake, have opened an investigation into the failure of the many modern buildings that should have been built to conform with recent anti-seismic regulations. The public will want to know whether the rules were adequate, whether they were applied, and who should have checked.

The Rome daily La Repubblica reported on Friday that some of the broken buildings may have been constructed using sea sand in the cement mix. Salt from the sand, which is cheaper than sand quarried on land, could have rusted away the reinforcing iron rods.

It is a widely held belief that corruption and cost-cutting have played a role in many of the building failures. Last summer, the president of the regional government and several centre-left councillors were arrested as part of a probe into corruption in the regional health service, along with a couple of representatives of the centre-right opposition. With all sides implicated, there is an understandable reluctance to make a political issue of it now.

A security video from one of the city's post offices revealed the earthquake's ferocity, as it rattled a large safe and scattered papers onto the ground.

In the once-picturesque Onna, not far from the epicentre of the quake, that kinetic surge, felt as far away as Rome and Naples, razed the entire village to the ground, killing 39 of its 370 inhabitants.

Sitting outside an army tent in a sports field near the village, 65-year-old Dora Paolucci said she was grateful for the help she had received from volunteer civil protection workers. She had escaped in her nightdress and had only been able to recover a couple of vital items from her shattered home.

"My son-in-law went back into the house to collect my glasses and my husband's dentures, but it was too dangerous for anything more than that," said Paolucci.

This is the second time in living memory that the village has lost a large portion of its population. In June, 1944, 17 villagers were massacred by the retreating German army for a seemingly futile reason. The area had served as a revictualing post for the beleaguered German garrison at Monte Cassino and relations between villagers and Germans had been generally friendly.

"Some of the victims had returned on foot from Russia and a week after arriving they were killed," said Luigi Nardecchia-Marzollo, who witnessed the massacre as a 13-year-old boy. "The Americans arrived the very next day."

In light of the massacre, the German government has offered to fund the reconstruction of Onna's 18th-century church.

Villagers may have been hoping for more extensive aid than that, but Nardecchia-Marzollo said the gesture would be appreciated. "It would be a beautiful gesture if the Germans were to fund reconstruction. It would mean those deaths were not completely in vain," he said.

Last week the Italian Space Agency said satellite photography showed the quake had moved the town of L'Aquila 15 centimetres from its original position.

It will take a bigger move than that in the mindset of Italian officialdom if the Abruzzo disaster - which has destroyed priceless churches, monuments and works of art as well as cost some 300 lives - is to produce a rigorous effort to improve the safety of other vulnerable structures in the country's many earthquake-prone areas.