Like so many people who have visited the Apennine mountains of Umbria, I have lain awake thinking of those whose villages and hamlets have been pulverised as if they were made of chalk. Earlier this year I wrote this column from the Roman walled town of Norcia, in a medieval inn that boasts of being the oldest in the region.

When my husband called last week to find out if they had been affected, they reassured him that, despite reports that it had been badly hit, there was minimal damage to the town, and the hotel was unscathed. After a terrible quake 40 years ago, the commune had made the buildings more secure. But Norcians must have shuddered to see the calamity that has struck neighbours a few kilometres away.

The utter devastation of Amatrice, Arquato del Tronto, Accumoli and very many others has led some in this deeply pious part of the world to ask why God abandoned them. With the death toll nearing 300, there have been prayers aplenty for the lost and the bereaved but, if there is an answer to what has happened, it surely lies in human hands, not the Almighty’s.

When the earthquake first hit, locals were reported as saying their towns could not and should not be rebuilt. They had lost everything, so what was the point? Yet it was striking how swiftly the tone changed. With a village such as Amatrice, whose population is around 2,000, people are already talking as if it is a question of not if, but when, reconstruction will begin. Understandably for the 60-odd hamlets nearby where only a handful lived, or where almost all residents have been killed, the issue might be less easily resolved. But for the moment, even in Amatrice, as severe aftershocks continue to shake the area, the prospect of raising edifices of stone that might at any moment tumble again must seem like tempting fate.

You wonder how anyone caught up in such a tragedy could ever sleep under a solid roof again. The psychological trauma survivors will live with for the rest of their days is likely to be extreme. Perhaps they will take comfort or courage from past experience. Italy has been the victim of thousands of catastrophes caused by the shifting tectonic plates on which it lies. In the past century, since the disaster in Messina in Sicily where 72,000 died in 1908, more than 110,000 have perished under stone, timber and rubble. But, where the numbers were once in the thousands, with better-built modern houses the death tolls are gradually falling.

Even so, it is an unspeakable fact about a country most of us regard as little short of idyllic. The summer playground of so many Brits, many of whom own property in the unstable hills that form Italy’s spine, Umbria has a charm all of its own. The slopes are forested, the air is as clear as water from a well and the people are so hospitable it’s as if they have all day to give you. The beauty and the lifestyle of the place palpably shapes their gregarious, laid-back personality. On the winding routes into the hills, contadini sell red potatoes, onions and peaches by the roadside and, from the bus, you can watch fish dart along streams that sparkle like glass in the sunshine. This is a place where food matters almost above all else. There are festivals and markets dedicated solely to spaghetti or lentils, truffles or cheese.

It would be too easy to say the lost villages should be left to moulder, that what they have witnessed is too awful for anyone ever to return. I remember a London journalist telling me, a few days after the Dunblane massacre, that, if she came from there, she would sell up and leave. My family, and all their friends who lived there, would have been bemused. Their response was not to flee, but to come together to remake the town so that, without ever forgetting those they mourned, it would one day be remembered for something other than the violence that had been visited upon it.

There is no comparison, I know, between a natural disaster and a man-made massacre except in one respect: the spirit necessary to overcome tragedy of any kind. Italians are used to deadly earthquakes, though that never diminishes their impact. For some the idea of returning to a scene of ruin, with all its memories, will certainly be too much to bear. Yet in places such as L’Aquila, 100 kilometres south where 300 died in 2009, a reconstruction scheme has allowed the homeless to go back willingly. Wonderful to behold, they now have confidence that the new structures, with their earthquake-proof pillars, will keep them safe; or as safe as it is possible to be.

The question, then, is not whether the collapsed villages should be rebuilt but why should they not? Home is one of the most powerful human instincts and to be forced to leave the place where one was born, or has happily settled, is a mental as well as a physical dislocation. No matter where we live, all of us accept the possibility of sudden death, aware that we could be hit by a bus or caught up in a terrorist attack. The risk that Italians live with, however, is far greater and less hypothetical, knowing as they do that, beneath them, the earth is perpetually grinding its teeth and some day they might be among the unlucky ones. This might indeed explain why they are so religious, placing their faith in a higher power to help them cope with the ever-present threat.

In their place I would put my trust in architects and in the government’s increasingly steely determination to make sure houses are built to the highest possible spec. “If the buildings had been constructed as they are in Japan,” Prosecutor Giuseppe Saieva said a few days ago, “they wouldn’t have collapsed.” Suspicion for the scale of the calamity has inevitably fallen on the Mafia, whose building companies see all housing projects, but particularly post-earthquake reconstruction, as nice little earners, their profits rising with every stone replaced with concrete, with each corner cut or trimmed.

No-one is naive enough to expect that rebuilding, even when of the highest calibre, means all danger will be extinguished. Sadly that can never be the case. Italy does, however, seem finally to recognise that the regularity and severity of seismic attack its people suffer means it must find a viable and positive response. Abandoning its most vulnerable regions and creating an ever-growing map of ghost towns where only weeds and wild boar thrive is not acceptable. So it is not just we onlookers with a rose-tinted view of the Apennines who would be appalled to think that paradise has been lost. All of Italy feels the same. With good governance and even better rebuilding, those who live there can be given reason to have confidence in their new homes. If that is so they might one day be grateful, if not for paradise regained then at least for peace of mind.