OPI, Italy -- Giustino Parisse has covered the range of the human condition as a journalist for 23 years with Il Centro, the daily newspaper in central Italy's Abruzzo region.

So, when an earthquake rocked the region's capital city of L'Aquila and surrounding villages at 3:32 a.m. April 6, he did what reporters are trained to do: Report.

What made his stories of the terremoto so compelling: He and his wife, Dina, were among the survivors.

Just a few miles from the epicenter, Mr. Parisse's tiny village of Onna -- inhabited for almost 1,000 years -- was almost erased during the quake that moved furniture in Rome, 60 miles away.

Forty-one of its 300 residents died, including both of his children and his 75-year-old father. His son Domenico was just 18; his daughter Maria Paola, 16.

"That night we lost everything: our lives, houses and our little village," he said last month through a translator, while sitting at Ortenzio Rosa's kitchen table in Opi, a small village about 11 miles east of Onna that also was damaged. Mr. Rosa is its vice mayor.

Mr. Parisse, 50, was certain his grief would consume him. Not only had his happy family life been destroyed, but the village he knew like the back of his hand had vanished, along with 1,000 years of history.

"Tutto era scomparso," he said. "Everything was gone."

But eight days later, he penned the first of what would be dozens of articles on the chaos that followed the quake. It was a way, he said, of giving an "electric shock to a dying body."

"You have a duty to collaborate, and assure rebirth," he said.

Those personal stories were published recently by Graphitype in the soft-back book "Quant'era bella la mia Onna" ("How beautiful was my Onna"). It was written, Mr. Parisse said, with a heart not just broken but in pezzi, or in pieces.

Onna has known tragedy before: In 1944, the Nazis massacred 17 Italians in the middle of town after a local boy tried to retrieve a horse stolen by soldiers. But the aftereffects of this latest catastrophe are almost unbearable. More than half a year later, much of the village still lies hidden beneath ugly piles of broken stone, household debris and twisted metal. It's a picture of destruction that's completely at odds with the gorgeous snow-capped peaks of the Gran Sasso in the distance.

Mr. Parisse talked about the agony of knowing his children had been buried under the rock; even though he was there when firefighters pulled his daughter's lifeless body out of the house, he refused to look. Almost as painful: They didn't find his father until the second day, and only identified him through a scar.

He also admitted to the stream of "what ifs?" that continue to buzz through his head. What if they hadn't traded rooms with their son? What if he'd gone on a walk with his daughter the Sunday before, like she'd wanted? His wife has found comfort in the church, but his faith, he said, has been shaken. It was, and is, a struggle not to be sucked into the emptiness.

Especially hard, he added, was not having a proper place to bury the dead or even cry for them. Like so many of those left homeless by the quake, the Parisses slept in a tent for several weeks and only recently moved into a new 1,600-square-foot house paid for by the government.

Italy is known for seismic activity: a 1980 earthquake in Irpinia in southern Italy killed more than 3,000 people. But Mr. Parisse said he felt immune from the danger.

Earthquakes come and go, his father and grandfather told him, so don't be afraid. The ground, in fact, had been trembling repeatedly in the four months leading up to the April 6 disaster. Yet when interviewed for his paper, government officials gave the same answer: It's impossible to predict an earthquake.

That's probably why Mr. Parisse didn't get his family out of the house when a 3.5-magnitude foreshock rattled the house around 11 p.m., followed by another big jolt 45 minutes later.

When l'orrendo scossone, the horrendous jolt, came at 3:32 a.m., it was so wicked Mr. Parisse and his wife, who'd been sleeping, couldn't move. They heard their daughter's broken scream, "Papa, Papa!" Then, silence. Their bedroom floor was suddenly the roof.

When they dug themselves out, all they found was dust, rocks -- and desperation. Help arrived within minutes, and "the rosary of the dead" began.

Mr. Parisse's elegant, staccato prose captures the way a mind works when trying to process tragedy. Giving his book even more poignancy are "before" pictures of Onna's picturesque streets taken in February by his son, an aspiring photographer, on a snow day from school. They're paired with "after" pictures snapped by the journalist's friend Carlo Cassano.

Mr. Parisse said his hope for the future is simple: Serenity. That, and to rebuild Onna as closely as possible to the way it was. The first of dozens of simple, single-story furnished homes, provided by communities in Italy's Trento region, the Red Cross and Italy's Department of Civil Protection, were dedicated in September. All proceeds of his book (available at www.deastore.com) will go toward a community sports field and the Onna Onlus and Pro Loco associations for the reconstruction of the country.

In life, he said, everything is precarious. So you have to take advantage of cose vere, or the true things in life, and give a hand to people who need it.

"What you leave behind," he said, "is how people will remember you."

Doug Oster writes a blog, "Growing With Doug," exclusively at PG+, a members-only web site of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Our introduction to PG+ gives you all the details.