There were 12 of them. Four of the bodies were in shiny new coffins. The rest were still in their improvised shrouds – quilts, sheets and even a gaily coloured curtain.
All round the paddock in which the dead had been laid out under a line of trees, there were other signs of the unbearable lightness of modern disaster: a woman in a blush-pink dressing gown who stood at the end of the line of coffins making the sign of the cross as the tears gushed down her cheeks; a man in a souvenir cap advertising Radio 101 who sat on a rock with his head bowed, just a yard or two from the grimly swathed bodies of his neighbours; the woman in the spangled Playboy bunny top who was pleading with her half-delirious, tear-stained friend not to go back into the centre of the village where rescue workers were burrowing in the ruins of what until 3.30am yesterday had been a pretty little village under the snow-capped Apennines.
Onna had about 300 inhabitants. One of the team of undertakers said they had already removed five. And within a half an hour another three corpses had been added to the sad line in the paddock, carried out of the centre by weary looking rescue workers, their faces caked in powdery dust.
In villages and towns nearby a similar ritual was being observed. By this morning rescue workers said more than 179 people were dead and 1,500 injured, in Italy's deadliest earthquake for nearly 30 years.
Tens of thousands more had been left homeless – all struck by a random tragedy.
In Onna, Pio Sbroglia's sister, Edwige, was one of the bundles of humanity pulled from the wreckage. "She thought she was all right at first and said she was going to make it. I was worried about the injuries to her head, but in the end the pressure of the bricks on her chest suffocated her," said the 62-year-old retired farm worker as he stood nearby, his arm in a sling and his hair matted with blood.
Sbroglia was angry. "Why weren't we told to go?" he asked. The authorities insist that nothing could have been done to predict the earthquake.
But, said Virgilio Collajani, his neighbour, the villagers had noticed tremors for the past three weeks. "And that isn't normal," he said. "This is a seismic area, sure. But no one alive here today has experienced an earthquake."
Onna dates back to medieval times, as do some of its houses. Others were built later by families who moved up from Sicily in the days when the Abruzzo formed part of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies.
Collajani began to reel off their surnames, but when he got to that of yet another family devastated by what had just happened he broke down and wept.
Minutes later, the ground shook. There was a dull, deep crack from underground – the latest in a long sequence of aftershocks that continued throughout the day and into the evening.
Screams went up from a group of women huddled nearby and some of them began to run senselessly, if understandably, away from the safe, open ground.
The really dangerous place to be was in the village centre where the buildings, many dating from the 16th and 17th centuries, had crumbled like piles of biscuits as the ground shook under the force of an earthquake felt as far away as Naples. Experts said the epicentre was just a few miles from Onna, on the road linking the city of L'Aquila to the hillside town of Paganica, where Angelo De Paolis, 57, and his friend had come to look at what was left of the convent.
The neoclassical convent of Santa Chiara with its handsome, cream-coloured facade was the proudest building in town. When the earthquake struck, it did surprisingly little damage to the tallest part of the convent, in the middle. But it devastated the wings.
The abbess, 61-year-old Mother Gemma Antoniucci, was apparently still asleep when the ceiling came crashing down on her. She was found dead. Another nun was pulled from the rubble but she, too, had died, according to a woman who drove up and wanted to know where the bodies had been taken.
De Paolis said he had worked as a mechanic in France for 30 years to get together the money to buy the house where he lived with his wife and their two children before it was shaken to the ground in what the mayor of L'Aquila called "20 interminable seconds".
"All that sacrifice," said De Paolis, shaking his head and giving a little half-smile of bewilderment. "All destroyed."
Had he not taken out an insurance policy? "No," he said. "It's not something you do in these parts." Italians have a fatalistic disposition. "In any case," said his friend, Ettore Fiordigigli, "the insurance companies often don't cover you for natural disasters." The earthquake, he said, had left them "out on the streets".
He and De Paolis and their families faced a night – perhaps the first of many – in a tent at the bottom of the hill where the emergency services had occupied the rugby ground and were busy turning it into a campsite. Yesterday was a clear, sunny day, but the snow on the mountains showed how cold it can get up here on the spine of Italy.
Some of the survivors fled. The first petrol station on the road that leads from L'Aquila through the mountains to the Autostrada del Sole, and from there to Rome, was packed yesterday morning with cars laden with people and luggage.
Along the road, people – mostly youngsters – sat, and in some cases slept, among their suitcases. Some were students made homeless when a hostel partially collapsed.
Angelo Battani had come to the city with a friend who was there to sit an exam for entry into Italy's revenue guard. They had been told that the trains were not running because the track was unsafe and were both hoping that, sooner or later, a bus would come along to take them to the capital.
"There were tremors on Sunday night at about 11," he said. "But I went to sleep and was woken by the earthquake just after 3.30. Our hotel held up well, but they brought out a lad from an older house nearby and I don't know whether he made it."
Buildings dating from before 1980, when Italy brought in strict rules for construction in seismic areas, appeared to have fared worst. A few hundred yards away, beyond a roundabout, a block of flats possibly dating from the 1950s looked as though its front had been smashed off like brittle icing on a wedding cake.
At Sant'Elia, on the outskirts of L'Aquila, Father Mauro Orru, the parish priest, stood looking at what was left of his church. His dog collar was unbuttoned and askew and his hair was dishevelled.
The church of San Lorenzo had been thrown up in the dying years of Italy's "economic miracle" between 1968 and 1970, he said.
Its reinforced concrete frame looked untouched, but the brickwork in between had collapsed, as had the rendering. Inside the church, a life-sized Saint Joseph leaned giddily at an angle, a baby Jesus lying in his arms, still intact but missing a finger.