The Uncnscious of History #2: The Vermicino Incident: The Collective Trauma of a Country at the Bottom of a Well

Introduction to the column: The Unconscious of History

History does not end in textbooks. It survives in the institutions we inhabit, in the ways we think about care, in the language we use to describe those who suffer. "The Unconscious of History" was born from a simple conviction: that understanding how the past built the psychological categories we use today — of normality, deviance, therapy, exclusion — is a necessary clinical and intellectual act, not a nostalgic exercise.

Each issue features a historical moment, a movement, a reform, a figure, and brings it into the present. Not to celebrate or condemn, but to ask ourselves: what of that moment is still alive in us? What does today's practice tell us?

The column is aimed at anyone who works in or moves through the world of psychology — researchers, clinicians, students, educators — and at anyone interested in history or the humanities, with the curiosity to look at their own discipline from the outside as well. The Unconscious of History is born precisely at the intersection: it is not a text of psychology applied to history, nor of the history of psychology, but a space in which the two perspectives question each other, convinced that understanding the past helps us read the present better — and that psychology, to know itself, also needs to know where it comes from.

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Introduction to this month's theme: The Vermicino Incident: the collective trauma of a country at the bottom of a well

On June 13, 1981, in the early hours of the morning, a journalist in a studio burst into tears on live television in front of millions of Italians. It was not an exception: it was the culmination of eighteen hours during which television had stopped reporting an event and had begun to become it.

This month, The Unconscious of History examines Vermicino — not as a news story, but as a collective clinical case. Because what happened around that well in the Lazio countryside does not only concern a child, a family, an unprepared rescue system. It concerns what happens to the mind of a community when it is exposed, in real time and without mediation, to a trauma it cannot resolve.

The question we carry within us is not what happened — it is what it did to us. How does collective trauma form? In what way do the media not merely document pain, but construct it, amplify it, make it shared to the point of making it constitutive of a national identity? And what remains, in institutions and in language, of a wound that was never truly processed — only transformed?

Vermicino is still alive. We find it in Civil Protection, in the way Italy manages emergencies, in the never-resolved relationship between information and spectacle. Descending into that well, forty years later, means asking ourselves how much of that night we have truly worked through — and how much we still carry inside us, without knowing it.

This newsletter was written in collaboration with @spazioemozione

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The Vermicino Incident: The Collective Trauma of a Country at the Bottom of a Well

It was a June evening. A quiet evening in the Italian countryside, on the outskirts of Rome. That night, something would change forever the history of Italy and our society, even though none of the people involved in this story knew it at the time.

A child, a mother, a firefighter, a speleologist: these are the protagonists of this story, united in their defeat by the monster of the tale, the well.

We will look together at the crucial phases of the Vermicino incident and the consequences it brought — very concrete consequences that had an enormous impact on how the Italian rescue system changed and on how emergency psychology developed in our country.

We will examine how much weight the media carried in the affair, and what collective trauma means and what effects it has on the psychological experience of a community — indeed, of an entire nation in this case.

01 — The World as It Was: The End of the First Republic

It was the 1980s of the now-previous century. Politically, Italy was going through a very complex moment, with the First Republic in decline and a government in deep crisis. The President at the time was Sandro Pertini, the partisan, a man who interpreted his institutional role in the most personal terms, and who would be, as we shall see, an important presence in the Vermicino incident.

We must imagine a world very different from today's, above all in terms of communications. In Italy, television was the primary source of news for families; social media did not exist, nor did smartphones. Information reached people slowly, and journalists played an important role in deciding which news to carry and how to communicate it.

We cannot tell the story of that summer evening in 1981 without recalling what had happened just the year before. In 1980, a violent earthquake struck Irpinia, a rugged area between Campania and Basilicata. The damage was enormous, with entire towns devastated and hundreds dead — a situation made worse by the fact that rescue services had serious difficulty reaching the seismic zone. Sandro Pertini publicly and sharply criticized what he considered grave failures in the rescue system.

We return to June 10, 1981. It was the beginning of summer, which for many families of that era meant the annual retreat to the countryside. Those who could moved to their second home and spent the warm summer months there — as did the family of little Alfredino, the Rampis, who were staying at the grandparents' house in Frascati, near Rome. The children would go for walks in the surrounding countryside, and it was on the way back from one of these walks that Alfredo, a six-year-old boy, fell into the well.

02 — The Fracture: The Well and the Pendulum of the Rescue Efforts

"I don't know how I managed it, what I could say to console him. Perhaps I was thinking about what I would have said to my four children, who were only a little older than him, when they were afraid." 

Nando Broglio

The sequence of what happened is well documented, as we shall see, but of those first hours we know only that Alfredo Rampi separated from his father on the way back from a walk, promising him he would go straight to his grandparents' house. He never made it.

His parents began searching for him with the help of the grandparents, but it was only after the arrival of the police's canine unit that they discovered their son had fallen into an artesian well nearby, covered by a metal sheet, in an area called Vermicino.

The events that unfolded over the following 60 hours constitute an incredible sequence of increasingly desperate attempts to reach that child trapped 36 meters down in a narrow shaft only 30 centimeters wide. To complicate matters further, Alfredino had a genetic heart condition. We know well what happened in those days because television dedicated an uninterrupted 18-hour live broadcast, documenting the various phases of the rescue.

We said there were several protagonists in this story. One was a firefighter, Nando Broglio, of whom we have a significant photograph beside a mound of earth, headset on. He communicated with Alfredino for hours through a microphone, keeping him awake, understanding how he was doing — until that morning of June 13.

Then came the speleologist, Donato Caruso, the last of the many who descended into that earthen tunnel to try to reach Alfredino, harness him, and bring him to the surface. The situation had become so frantic during the rescue that they were willing to send even a 15-year-old boy, with little experience, down into the well.

Of the mother, Franca Rampi, we have several images — megaphone in hand beside the well, sheltering under an umbrella, hands in her hair, embraced by the President. She was harshly criticized for her operational, seemingly unemotional response. Yet she was the first to tell Pertini what had happened during those hours, what the rescue teams had and had not done.

They were not the only ones waiting desperately for Alfredino to be saved. Millions of Italians were glued to their television sets. The live broadcast began at the end of the TG1 news on June 12; the director at the time, Emilio Fede, was looking for something emotional (his own words) that was missing from the news lineup — and he found it. What was meant to be a brief live segment showing the moment of rescue became an hours-long broadcast that concluded at 7 in the morning on June 13.

All of Italy was present at Vermicino — symbolically in the figure of its President, Sandro Pertini, and in reality through all those following the story in their homes.

Donato Caruso had returned from the well with the news: Alfredino was dead. Massimo Valentini, the journalist in the studio, said "Rest in peace" — and burst into tears.

03 — The Psychological Lens: Collective Trauma, the Wounded Community, and the Scrutinizing Eye of the Media

"It was a night like that of the first moon landing: the triumph of technology then; its tragic defeat now, before the well at Vermicino. One could go to the moon, but one could not save a child who had fallen into a well. From this came a sense of anguished helplessness, of despair." 

Leonardo Sciascia

In psychology there is a subject that remains perpetually marginal in the processes of intervention and care: the community. Defining what a community is is not always straightforward — we might say it is a collective entity that transcends the individual and creates a network of connections, relationships, and meanings. Community arises at the interface between the individual and the collective.

Emergency psychology expresses its highest form of psychological intervention on the community precisely when the latter is torn, wounded, and powerless.

Vermicino shifted from being a local news story — tragic, certainly, but still limited in space and time to a rural community — to being one of the most serious tragedies in Italian history, because of the role played by the media, by television, which proved crucial in the narration of the event.

From a communications standpoint, Vermicino was, to cite the analyses of Aldo Nove and Carlo Tirinanzi De Medici, the first "truly spontaneous programme" capable of stabilizing national identity through the televisual gaze. The journalists wanted to document a heroic rescue: they found themselves holding a narrative subject that escaped their control, because it was something that had never happened before. They documented a series of failures, foremost among them the absence of any real coordination in the rescue efforts. The attempts were guided by intuition, by a spirit of sacrifice, and by the pull of spontaneous help — which, unfortunately, was not enough for success. The right equipment was lacking (the drilling rig needed for the excavations that proved necessary was sought through a public appeal), and in the end there was the suspicion that certain maneuvers had done more harm than good.

The presence of Sandro Pertini gave the affair an even more institutional dimension. Although there were those who criticized him for being on-site, his participation amplified the effect the incident had on public opinion until it took on the dimension of a "state affair." It was no longer a family's tragedy — it became a national suffering.

Collective trauma does not merely strike individuals, but profoundly alters the cohesion and identity of a social group in the wake of catastrophic events. Cathy Caruth describes trauma as a wound that is not integrated after the event but returns in the form of flashbacks and fragments, resisting comprehension and acceptance. Within a collectivity, trauma lives in narratives, symbols, and dynamics of power.

Yet, at the collective level too, the traumatic event — however difficult to narrate through ordinary means — endures as historical memory, a reservoir of not always coherent or clear recollections that are transmitted to ensure the survival of the community.

According to Jan Assmann, what produces cultural memory is an active process of selecting and interpreting the past through rites, texts, and monuments that define the identity of a community.

Collective memory, therefore, is not merely a sum of individual recollections, but a social dimension that comes into being within shared frameworks. As Maurice Halbwachs maintained, "one only remembers in relation to others," and memories allow for the creation of a shared identity within a group. In the case of the Vermicino incident, the memory of the event has survived through us because it became part of our institutional fabric.

Interwoven with memory is the dimension of resilience — the reaction of a community wounded and shaken by the loss of one of its youngest members. Group resilience is the capacity to withstand traumatic change through flexibility and adaptability, recognizing the strengths available to emerge from crisis "stronger than before." To activate collective resilience, a shift in perspective is required — one that allows for the explicit identification of still-available resources (material and immaterial), that builds on cultural values and a sense of belonging, and that activates external support networks through an active orientation. In this sense, the figure of the leader (Sandro Pertini), as the highest office of the nation, played the role of catalyst in the aftermath of the incident.

04 — The Legacy: What We Cannot Forget

"President of the Republic Sandro Pertini had arrived at the site without notifying the authorities present, and I was told he was still nearby. I decided to go and speak with him, because I had seen too many absurd things in those days. I wanted to tell him everything: from the moment my son went missing to the moment of his death. And so I did. He replied: 'Signora, I am dismayed — I don't know what to say, I have no words. Is it really possible that there was all this confusion? Is it really possible that nothing worked?' A few months later I received a phone call from him, and he told me that for me he had created a Ministry — that of Civil Protection." 

Franca Rampi

Every year, the Civil Protection Department commemorates Alfredino Rampi with the only public image we have of him: a child in a striped undershirt, smiling happily.

Sandro Pertini accelerated the process that led to the appointment of a Minister of Civil Protection. In 1990, this evolved into the Civil Protection Department — the body that currently coordinates the national rescue system in Italy.

The legacy of Vermicino found expression in the civic commitment of the Rampi family. The founding of the Centro Alfredo Rampi represented the determination to transform the horror of the "chasm" into active citizenship. The Centre set itself the goal of introducing a culture of risk in Italy, promoting prevention and safety as shared values.

The passage from trauma to commitment made it possible to convert collective disorientation into a permanent civic structure, capable of working every day toward the protection of human life — marking the definitive transition from the passivity of grief to the solidity of action.

Vermicino remains a pillar of Italian historical memory, an event in which human fragility collided with exhaustion. Its legacy is profoundly dual: on one hand, it generated a state-of-the-art Civil Protection system, capable of providing coherent and unified responses to national crises; on the other, it inaugurated a media language in which pain is often reduced to spectacle. While the images from that time now appear worn by the distance of years, the institutions born from that crisis remain the only concrete bulwark against the "abyss of darkness" and silence that swallowed Alfredino.

05 — The Open Question: Something That Tastes of Hope

"The tragedy of little Alfredino is a story that left a deep mark on all who lived through it, even as mere spectators. Then it ended up in some remote corner of our consciousness — individual and collective. But no one has ever forgotten it. Now the time has come to tell it." 

Massimo Gamba, author of Vermicino. L'Italia nel pozzo.

In Italy, every child who falls into a well is Alfredino. That child whom no one was able to save, and who at the same time enabled the saving of so many others in the forty years that followed.

The tragic dimension of an emergency lies precisely in its being a severe lesson for the future — and at the same time, that lesson, from a psychological point of view, allows us to make our own the pain that the emergency causes us, to give it some semblance of meaning, and to build from those ruins something new: something that tastes of hope.

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Conclusion

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