Italy quake kills 150; thousands homeless

L'AQUILA, Italy — At twilight on Monday, seven wooden coffins lay on the ground under a gnarled tree in Onna, a tiny village eight miles from here. A woman was slumped in grief over one, while people comforted her. After a few moments, five men strained to lift four coffins into a funeral van.

"They belonged to an entire family: a husband, wife and their two children," said one of the men, Piero Taffo, who runs a funeral home in L'Aquila.

As the death toll continued to rise late Monday from a powerful earthquake that shook central Italy early in the day, officials said that as many as 150 people had been killed, at least 1,500 injured and tens of thousands left homeless.

The 6.3-magnitude quake seriously damaged historic buildings in the medieval hill towns of the mountainous Abruzzo region east of Rome. Most of the deaths and damage were centered in L'Aquila, a picturesque fortress town at the epicenter, but more than 26 nearby villages were also affected, some seriously. Historic buildings in the surrounding region in the Apennine mountains were also damaged. "Some towns in the area have been virtually destroyed in their entirety," Gianfranco Fini, the speaker of the lower house of Parliament, said in Rome before the chamber observed a moment of silence.

Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, who canceled a trip to Moscow to survey the region by helicopter, declared a state of emergency.

"It's a disaster never before seen," said Franco Totani, a lawyer who said he was leaving L'Aquila to stay with an uncle in Rome. "I've seen earthquakes before, but this is a catastrophe."

The narrow streets of L'Aquila's historic center were filled with rubble, and parked cars were crushed under large blocks of debris. About 80,000 people live in L'Aquila and the surrounding area.

The cupola of the 18th-century Santa Maria del Suffragio church cracked open like an eggshell, exposing the stucco patterns inside the dome. Part of the transept of the 13th-century Santa Maria di Collemaggio basilica collapsed, as did a small cupola in the 18th-century church of Sant'Agostino.