Quake in Italy

The earthquake in L'Aquila and the surrounding villages hit at around 3 am when people slept.

Stefania, mother to seven-year-old Sara, said: "My husband managed to get out of bed but I was completely covered in rubble and I couldn't move and I heard my daughter calling from her bed: 'Mamma, mamma'. I was going crazy, trying to get all the debris off me but I couldn't, and I was thinking: 'If she dies, I want to die with her'." The family was eventually rescued and taken to hospital.

Latest estimates are 235 dead, 50,000 homeless, 15 missing and 13,000 buildings damaged or destroyed.

The deadliest quake to hit Italy in decades left onlookers weeping and every one  afraid as aftershocks continue to rumble.

Rescuers combed piles of rubble with their hands, searching frantically for survivors, but in Onna, a village of mostly elderly residents, the houses made of heavy stone walls that had lasted for centuries crumpled into piles of toppled stones.  The town's physician said

"I ran from house to house, but there were just mountains of stones and screams

Some of the unaccounted for were students at the university in the medieval town of L'Aquila
A fireman from the port of Pescara who came to help rescue efforts collapsed in tears after unearthing the body of his stepdaughter, who was studying there.

Working by floodlight, rescuers used a crane to gradually dismantle a ruined university dormitory in the hope of finding survivors. As darkness fell, workers dragged out the bodies of two of the four students still missing.

Some 7000 emergency rescuers worked through a second night under powerful lamps rescuing several young people and one 98-year-old woman who said that she spent 30 hours knitting as she waited to be freed from her ruined home.

"I worked, I knitted," said Mrs D'Antuono, from the village of Tempera, close to L'Aquila. The redoubtable nonagenarian told rescuers that she was in good health when she was found this morning,

As she was carried out by firefighters, she pleaded with them: "At least let me comb my hair."

After rehousing the homeless, the rescue work will extend to artwork

Before and after pictures here