#monte toc

- “Toc” “Toc”

- Chi è?

- 1917

- 1917 cosa?

- 1917 morti, di cui 487 bambini

- Ah si, la diga del #Vajont nel '63 fu una tragedia

once upon a time there was a dam and a song

“Do you happen to know a girl from Rome Whose face looks like the collapse of a dam?”

This is a line from an old, beautiful song by a great Italian singer-songwriter, Francesco De Gregori. The song is called Atlantide.

In this case, Atlantide is the symbol of a faraway, isolated place where one retreats to grieve over a love that ended because of misunderstandings and words left unsaid… It’s a song about regret.

That particular verse has always stayed with me.

When I was very little, there were only two TV channels, both in black and white. You switched between them by pressing a big button on the set. First channel, second channel.

I loved television. It was only turned on in the evening, mostly for the news. There weren’t many programs back then—or maybe I just don’t remember them…

Some of the news stories left a mark on me: a murder, strikes, attacks, protests, certain soccer matches… One report was about the inauguration of something rebuilt after being destroyed by the collapse of a dam.

They showed some footage of that event, along with terrifying images of the disaster that had taken place just a few years earlier, before I was born.

Those images really stuck with me: death, devastation, a wave of mud that had swept away two entire villages. And the dam itself hadn’t even collapsed (it still stands today); it was a piece of the mountain supporting it that gave way, creating a monstrous wave that surged over the dam and engulfed two entire towns in its path, destroying everything.

Years later, when I heard this song, I wondered how a woman’s face could possibly be so dreadful and terrifying as to resemble the collapse of a dam.

Many years after that, I went to visit those towns and the museum dedicated to that tragedy. A film and even a moving stage play had been created about it.

And I discovered that, as so often happens, the disaster had been widely predicted and warned about, but no one lifted a finger to stop it—in fact, quite the opposite.

Today, October 9, 2025, marks 62 years since the Vajont disaster.

I’ve met people whose faces seemed to bear the collapse of a dam, people who had lived through the horror, the death, the destruction.

I’ll speak of it more, another time. For now, I remember the collapse at Vajont and its nearly 2,000 dead, the towns of Erto, Casso, and Longarone buried in mud, and the voices that tried to warn of the danger—voices that were silenced.