Abstract

We explore ministerial and media files to account for the narratives and discourses that accompany the process of reconstruction after disasters resulting from earthquakes in 1939 and 1960. This is explored with the intention of following the way the city will conceive from these processes of reconstruction, seeing how they are carried on with their similarities and differences. It does see the great similarity between the different disasters in terms of public action and the narratives that accompany them. That which might lead one to believe in a strong disaster in living memory of the city, shows quite the opposite with a tendency to forget, and this could explain the persistence of the processes of reconstruction and an institutional disaster without really prepared for it, despite the existence of important decisions made in the twentieth century to address them.