Pouring rain and cold nights in this mountainous area are the conditions faced by some 40,000 homeless who are now living under tents in the Abruzzo region.

L’Aquila’s rugby stadium has been transformed into an emergency camp. Three weeks after the earthquake that killed nearly 300 people, survivors are trying to organise their new lives.

Maria Elena Rattilio lives here under a tent with 12 other family members.

“Put it this way: it is a normality that is different from the normality we were used to”, she says. “It is a temporary normality while waiting for a new life that will come quickly, we hope.”

“Sometimes we feel anger, it’s true, even if we have the feeling that we were blessed, that it is a miracle that we are alive.”

Her house is still standing nearby but the authorities are preventing her from going back for security reasons.

“We want to restart as soon as possible. It’s one of the reasons why we have decided not to escape - because our roots are here. We felt it wasn’t right to leave everything behind."

It is in a police sports centre on the outskirts of L’Aquila that the survivors’ fate and the future of this region are being decided. The centre manages all assistance and the reconstruction operations. Politicians, technicians, lawyers, firemen and soldiers are all working under the same roof.

"The emergency now is to transfer most of those people who are under tents into prefabricated houses, in a kind of normal housing,” Agostino Miozzo, General Director of the National Civilian Protection told FRANCE 24. “The emergency is to do that before winter comes."

Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has made a firm pledge: by October, when the snow will falling again, there will be nobody left living in tents. He is taking a bet on his reputation as a man who gets things done in a country where temporary measures often turn out to be permanent.

Thousands of children are also taking the path to normality by returning to school, even though it’s under a plastic sheet within the camp.

For a few hours, Maria Elena, the survivor, again becomes the teacher she was before the earthquake.

“We are kind of improvising at the moment”, she explains after a morning class. “It’s early days. But my colleagues are all full of goodwill. So, even if we improvise, we manage to get something done."

"Even if it is not in a real school, the fact that they are attending class is important”, says Liberata De Santis, another survivor, as she comes to pick up her 6-year-old daughter. “It is helping the children to forget the bad moments."

Thanks to the assistance coming in from all over the country, the Abruzzo survivors are slowly starting slowly to smile again. This is in spite of the earth tremors still felt every day, and the concern of being forgotten now that the visit from the Pope is over, and the political and media circus has moved on.