L'AQUILA, Italy Nadia Gabrielli and her sister, Giuliana, dragged suitcases over the rubble of what remained of L'Aquila. The earthquake early on Monday morning devastated this city of about 68,000 in the Abruzzo region of central Italy. Nearly 300 were killed in the area, and some 28,000 people forced into tent villages and other temporary shelters. Save for a few like the Gabriellis, desperate to retrieve belongings, only stray dogs and rescue workers now wander this city's empty streets, picking through debris. Anxiously, the two women asked for help fetching medicine from an apartment in a building that had cracked like a hard-boiled egg, a gaping horizontal fissure running straight through the second-story windows and balcony. Afterward the sisters lamented what had happened to their beloved "city of culture," as Nadia Gabrielli put it. In the aftermath, tending to the injured and the dead comes first. But local residents as well as teams of officials have already begun to assess the cultural damage. The earthquake 12 years ago that ravaged Umbria wasn't nearly as severe but it made headlines abroad because it damaged tourist sites like the famous basilica in Assisi. Less glamorous, Abruzzo is rich in its own heritage, which is priceless to the people here. "I lived in Latin America and South America for many years," Nadia Gabrielli added, "but I came back here because this is my city, my culture. It's our identity." Italy is not like America. Art isn't reduced here to a litany of obscene auction prices or lamentations over the bursting bubble of shameless excess. It's a matter of daily life, linking home and history. Italians don't visit museums much, truth be told, because they already live in them and can't live without them. The art world might retrieve a useful lesson from the rubble. Italy's prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, has been busily soliciting foreign aid for cultural restoration after the quake. More than 11,000 volunteers and rescue workers have rushed to help. Milko Morichetti is one, a 39-year-old art restorer from Mogliano, in the Italian Marches. "Without the culture that connects us to our territory, we lose our identity," he said. "There may not be many famous artists or famous monuments here, but before anything, Italians feel proud of the culture that comes from their own towns, their own regions. And when we restore a church or a museum, it gives us hope. This is not just about preserving museum culture. For us, it's about a return to normalcy." It's also normal, alas, that nothing happened after a recent report, yet another by the Italian authorities, about the need to seismically retrofit countless Italian monuments and churches. The effort was clearly too much in every sense for Italians to bear. But so is what happened last week. Before then, Santa Maria di Paganica was a lovely parish church in L'Aquila. Built in the 14th century, like many buildings here it collapsed in the earthquake of 1703, then rose again. Today plaster dust blows skyward on gusts of wind through where the church's ceiling once was. The dome has collapsed. Chunks of its frescoes, like meat in a butcher shop, dangle from the remains of the cupola, gently swaying in the breeze. The Church of Santa Maria del Suffragio in the Piazza del Duomo, an 18th-century gem by Carlo Buratti, is now in shambles. An aftershock sent what remained of its dome, by Giuseppe Valadier, tumbling. Someone had leaned a tall, thin wood cross on the bronze doors of the hulking Duomo, an unlovely pile on the same square; but just north, in the Piazza del Palazzo, an ancient statue of the Roman historian Sallust presides over a lovely bed of pansies. City Hall in the piazza wasn't faring as well. Its stone bell tower, bearing a bronze testament to the workers of L'Aquila, "The Knights of Humanity," showed cracks along the base. A plaque carved with the names of benefactors of a local orphanage, the first dating back to 1542, lay shattered like peanut brittle in a heap opposite a palace where colorful stuffed animals smiled from behind a toy-store window on the ground floor arcade. The palace roof has fallen in. In Sicilian towns like Belice, Salemi and Poggioreale, where an earthquake struck in 1968, seismic safety became an excuse to abandon historic centers for what the art critic Vittorio Sgarbi, the mayor of tiny Salemi, has described as "urban suburbs." He wrote in an appeal to Mr. Berlusconi in the newspaper Il Giornale the other day that when L'Aquila is rebuilt, its cultural heritage must be restored: "With wounded places, destroyed towns, and families who have lost their homes, you cannot also take away their memory." He's right, and not just about L'Aquila. In Paganica, a few miles away, a half-dozen people died in the quake. The Church of Santa Maria della Concezione, marking the main square, now has cannonball-size holes. Narrow streets snake uphill from there toward Santa Maria del Presepe, also called the Madonna della Castello. Its stoic facade had boasted a handsome rose window. Birds fly in and out now. Along the side of the church facing the snowy Apennines, rubble blocked the path. The other side overlooked a pretty meadow. Erected in 1605, the church outlasted the earthquake of 1703. But today its two large bells barely hang from the crumbling bell tower, a pathetic sight. A Paganica resident wept over the bells on Italian television. In L'Aquila, Giovanni Berti de Marinis, 24, stood in the sunshine and eerie silence photographing a mountain of debris that made a barricade of what had been his street. It seemed heartless to ask him about lost culture, but he offered anyway. His voice trembling, he said: "It's upsetting that people understand how beautiful L'Aquila is only when it's destroyed." It is.