On assignment for Vanity Fair Italy we have explored 4 Italian "new towns" which have been built in the recent past after been hit by natural disasters. In all these cases, the populations had been displaced away from the original town into newly built settlement.

New Towns

Conza della Campania, rebuilt in the valley after the 980 earthquake; Gibellina, a novel town built after the 1968 earthquake; Vajont, a new town where people where relocated from the areas invested by the 1963 tragedy of the Vajont dam; Sarno, partially destroyed by a landslide in 1998.
Italy has a long history of geological instability and consequent natural disasters. Since the first settlement on this land, eartquakes, vulcanic eruptions and land movements have ruled over man's effort to create and build homes and towns. However humans have always proved stubborn, patiently recreating what had been destroyed. A peculiar case of reconstructions is the one where the old center of the town is abandoned in favour of a less dangerous and more stable one.