Italian flooding

Debris-strewn Monterosso and (extreme right of picture) the currently inaccessible Vernazza, Italy, December 2011

From above, the village of Vernazza looks perfect. But try to get down there and it’s almost impossible. Every little road is blocked. Only relief workers and residents are allowed in during the day, and most of its residents have moved temporarily to villages nearby. In Monterosso, the new town is almost back to normal, but you can still see piles of debris everywhere – trees, cars, mattresses, sticks of furniture, pipes and polythene, all bound together with mud.

This was a freak meteorological event. Over the night of October 25/26 last year, 500mm – nearly 2ft – of rain fell in a matter of six hours on the Cinque Terre, the stretch of Mediterranean coastline in northwest Italy which is a tourist haven and a Unesco World Heritage Site. Both Monterosso al Mare and Vernazza suffered extensive damage.

The mudslides started from above. Pine trees have very shallow roots and are soon washed away; the trees fall, a pool of water forms in the hole where the roots were, this becomes mud and starts a little slide, which meets another and another, and so they rush down the hillsides dragging trees and debris with them. In every valley there is only a drainage pipe under the road to allow the water though. All these became blocked, and so the pressure built up until there was one huge mudslide that took everything with it. The storm came after a very dry summer, so the water didn’t sink into the ground so easily … All these little things come together, and then you have that amount of water. It’s unbelievable. In La Spezia, only a few miles away, there was almost nothing. In Lucca, where I live, it rained for maybe 20 minutes.

Now everybody is working to get things back to normal for the beginning of the tourist season in spring. The travel companies worry that people will stay away. The business is important not just for them but for the Italian economy as a whole. Will the government continue to help? Right now, most people are optimistic that by the summer everything will be back to normal. And from a distance, as you can see, it is beautiful.

Massimo Vitali is an Italian photographer whose work focuses on the relationship between people and the natural landscape. He currently has an exhibition at the Brancolini Grimaldi gallery in London, which runs until January 28. www.massimovitali.com

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