With the full horror of the death toll in San Giuliano di Puglia now revealed, mounting anger and soul-searching dominate Saturday's Italian papers.

"The Earthquake and its accomplices" reads a blistering front-page commentary in Rome's L'Unita newspaper.

"What a wretched country is one that cannot even protect its own children?" the paper asks, cataloguing what it sees as the neglected measures that might have prevented such a tragedy.

Blame and shame

The words uttered by San Giuliano's priest on Friday that people wanted to blame God, but that "God is most certainly not the engineer who calculates the cement", are widely quoted.

Leading dailies Corriere della Sera and La Repubblica are among those that report that Italy's national earthquake service had drawn up a report in 1998 reclassifying quake risks and saying the area around San Giuliano di Puglia was threatened.

But news of the reclassification did not reach the local authorities due to bureaucratic wrangling.

... only one colour: that of shame

Corriere della Sera

The reinforced concrete floor that collapsed would have been declared illegal in the light of the report.

"An Italy that announces great projects but does not manage to let a small village in Molise know that maybe one day an earthquake will hit it, has only one colour: that of shame," Corriere della Sera says.

History of neglect?

Newspapers in southern Italy are particularly indignant at what they see as evidence of a long-standing history of neglect of the infrastructure in the poorer south by the government in Rome.

An editorial in Taranto's Corriere del Giorno, published in the Puglia region which borders earthquake-hit Molise, recalls that only a year ago a government report found that one in three of Italy's educational establishments was in need of structural work.

Why is it that in the reckoning of the State... the school system remains the Cinderella in terms of investment?

Gazzetta del Sud

"It goes without saying that the situation in the south was much worse than the north, and that Naples was in last place, after Reggio Calabria," well-known editor and teacher Marcello D'Orta writes.

Leading Neapolitan daily Il Mattino points out that the country has accumulated a huge public spending debt over the years.

"But how has it been spent? Not on schools it seems. And even less so on schools in the south."

Symbol of ills

The Gazzetta del Sud sees the collapsed school as a symbol of wider ills, primarily of the neglect of what should be seen as social priorities.

"Why is it that in the reckoning of the state, the regions and the municipalities, the school system remains the Cinderella in terms of investment? Why do polemics arise over the lack of funds for summer concerts, but never over the state of schools?" it asks

"Why, in short, is that world which today lies buried in rubble, always left till last?"

BBC Monitoring, based in Caversham in southern England, selects and translates information from radio, television, press, news agencies and the Internet from 150 countries in more than 70 languages.