Dawn broke over the rolling hills of central Lazio and Le Marche regions after a night of uninterrupted search efforts. Aided by sniffer dogs and audio equipment, firefighters and rescue crews using their bare hands pulled chunks of cement, rock and metal apart from mounds of rubble where homes once stood searching for signs of life.

One area of focus was the Hotel Roma in Amatrice, famous for the Amatriciana bacon and tomato pasta sauce that brings food lovers to this medieval hilltop town each August for its food festival.

Amatrice’s mayor had initially said 70 guests were in the crumbled hotel ahead of this weekend’s festival, but rescue workers later halved that estimate after the owner said most guests managed to escape.

Firefighters’ spokesman Luca Cari said that one body had been pulled out of the hotel rubble just before dawn but that the search continued there and elsewhere, even as 460 aftershocks rattled the area after the magnitude 6 temblor struck at 3:36 a.m. on Wednesday.

“We’re still in a phase that allows us to hope we’ll find people alive,” Cari said, noting that in the 2009 earthquake in nearby L’Aquila a survivor was pulled out after 72 hours.

Worst affected by the quake were the tiny towns of Amatrice and Accumoli near Rieti, 100 kilometers (60 miles) northeast of Rome, and Pescara del Tronto, 25 kilometers (15 miles) further east.

Italy’s civil protection agency reported the death toll had risen to 247 early Thursday with at least 264 others hospitalized. Most of the dead — 190 — were in Amatrice and Accumuli and their nearby hamlets.

“From here everyone survived,” said Sister Mariana, one of three nuns and an elderly woman who survived the quake that pancaked half of her Amatrice convent.

“They saved each other, they took their hands even while it was falling apart, and they ran, and they survived.”

She said that others from another part of the convent apparently didn’t make it: Three other nuns and four elderly women.

The civil protection agency set up tent cities around the affected towns to accommodate the homeless, 1,200 of whom took advantage of the offer to spend the night, civil protection officials said Thursday. In Amatrice, some 50 elderly and children spent the night inside a local sports facility.

“It’s not easy for them,” said civil protection volunteer Tiziano De Carolis, helping to care for about 350 homeless in Amatrice.

“They have lost everything, the work of an entire life, like those who have a business, a shop, a pharmacy, a grocery store and from one day to another they discovered everything they had was destroyed.”

As the search effort continued, the soul-searching began once again as Italy confronted the effects of having the highest seismic hazard in Western Europe, some of its most picturesque medieval villages, and anti-seismic building codes that aren’t applied to old buildings and often aren’t respected when new ones are built.

“In a country where in the past 40 years there have been at least eight devastating earthquakes … the only lesson we have learned is to save lives after the fact,” columnist Sergio Rizzo wrote in Thursday’s Corriere della Sera. “We are far behind in the other lessons.”

Experts estimate that 70 percent of Italy’s buildings aren’t built to anti-seismic standards. After every major quake, proposals are made to improve, but they often languish in Italy’s thick bureaucracy, funding shortages and the huge scope of trying to secure thousands of ancient towns and newer structures built before codes were passed or after the codes were in effect but in violation of them.

In recent quakes, some of these more modern buildings have been the deadliest: the university dormitory that collapsed in the 2009 L’Aquila quake, killing 11 students; the elementary school that crumbled in San Giuliano di Puglia in 2002, killing 26 children — the town’s entire first-grade class. In some cases, the anti-seismic building standards have been part of the problem, including using reinforced cement for roofs that are then too heavy for weak walls when quakes strike.

Premier Matteo Renzi, visiting the quake-affected zone Wednesday, promised to rebuild “and guarantee a reconstruction that will allow residents to live in these communities, to relaunch these beautiful towns that have a wonderful past that will never end.”

While the government is already looking ahead to reconstruction, rescue workers on the ground still had days and weeks of work ahead of them. In hard-hit Pescara del Tronto, firefighter Franco Mantovan said early Thursday that crews knew of three residents still under the rubble, but in a hard-to-reach area.

In the evening there, about 17 hours after the quake struck, firefighters pulled a 10-year-old girl alive from a crumbled home.

“You can hear something under here. Quiet, quiet,” one rescue worker said, before soon urging her on: “Come on, Giulia, come on, Giulia.”

Cheers broke out when she was pulled out.

But there were wails when bodies emerged.

“Unfortunately, 90 percent we pull out are dead, but some make it, that’s why we are here,” said Christian Bianchetti, a volunteer from Rieti who was working in devastated Amatrice.

Story: Frances D’Emilio and Nicole Winfield 

President Juan Manuel Santos hailed the agreement with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia as an opportunity to turn the page on decades of political violence that has claimed more than 220,000 lives and driven more than 5 million people from their homes. He said he would hold a plebiscite on Oct. 2 to give Colombians the chance to vote on the accord. Without their approval implementation can’t begin.

In Colombia’s capital of Bogota, some 400 people gathered in a plaza to watch on giant screen the agreement being announced by negotiators in Havana who have been working around the clock in recent days to hammer out the final sensitive details left to the end of the four years of talks.

“We’ve won the most beautiful of all battles: the peace of Colombia,” the chief FARC negotiator, Ivan Marquez, said at the announcement in Havana.

As soon as his speech finished, bringing the televised event to an end, the emotional crowd on the plaza sang the national anthem and shouted “Viva Colombia! Yes to Peace!”

“I can die in peace because finally I’ll see my country without violence with a future for my children,” said Orlando Guevara, 57, crying as white flags symbolizing peace waved behind him.

The accord, whose final text has yet to be published, commits Colombia’s government to carrying out aggressive land reform, overhauling its anti-narcotics strategy and greatly expanding the state’s presence in long-neglected areas of the country.

Negotiations began in November 2012 and were plagued by distrust built up during decades of war propaganda on both sides.

Polls say most Colombians loathe the rebel group known as the FARCand show no hesitation labeling them “narco-terrorists” for their heavy involvement in Colombia’s cocaine trade, an association for which members of the group’s top leadership have been indicted in the U.S. Meanwhile, the FARC held onto a Cold War view of Colombia’s political and economic establishment as “oligarchs” at the service of the U.S.

The rebel army was forced to the negotiating table after a decade of heavy battlefield losses that saw a succession of top rebel commanders killed by the U.S.-backed military and the its ranks thinned by half to the current 7,000 troops.

Santos, an unlikely peacemaker given his role as architect of the military offensive, throughout maintained a steady pulse even as he was labeled a traitor by his conservative former allies and suffered a plunge in approval ratings.

The most contentious breakthrough came in September when the president traveled to Havana to lay out with FARC commander Rodrigo Londono a framework for investigating atrocities, punishing guerrillas for involvement in those abuses and offering compensation to victims.

Opponents of Santos and some human rights groups harshly criticized a key part of that deal: guerrillas who confess their crimes won’t spend any time in prison and will instead be allowed to serve out reduced sentences of no more than eight years helping rebuild communities hit by the conflict.

Another toad to swallow, as Santos calls the concessions he’s had to make, will be the sight of former rebel leaders occupying seats in congress specially reserved for the FARC’s still unnamed political movement. In one of the last details brokered in marathon, 18-hour sessions, both sides agreed to guarantee the FARC a minimum of five seats in the lower house and five in the Senate for two legislative periods lasting until 2026. After that the former rebels will have to prove their political relevancy at the ballot box.

Santos’ plebiscite is not without risks. While polls say Colombians will likely endorse a deal in a simple yes or no vote, the stunning Brexit vote in Britain to leave the European Union is a cautionary tale.

Colombia’s opposition is likely to try to convert the vote into a referendum on Santos, whose approval rating plummeted to 21 percent in May, according to a Gallup poll. That is the lowest since he took office in 2010. Low voter turnout is also a concern because a minimum of 13 percent of the electorate, or about 4.4 million voters, must vote in favor for the accord to be ratified.

“We think we’ve done the best possible job, but it’s the Colombians who will judge us,” chief government negotiator Humberto de la Calle said. “We have to wait for the citizens’ verdict.”

After the agreement is signed — the date is still unknown — the FARCwill begin mobilizing its troops to 31 zones scattered across the country, and 90 days later they are supposed to begin handing their weapons over to United Nations-sponsored monitors.

But don’t expect any immediate peace dividend or security improvements in Colombia’s blood-splattered countryside.

Over the last 13 months, since the FARC declared a unilateral cease-fire and the government reciprocated with a truce of its own in all but name, violence has fallen to the lowest level since the FARC was created 52 years ago by outlaw peasant groups joined by communist activists. Only four deaths attributed to the FARC have been reported during that period and in the last 68 days the group hasn’t carried out a single offensive action, according to a report last week by the Bogota-based Conflict Analysis Resource Center.

Analysts are concerned that as the rebels integrate into Colombian society, well-organized criminal gangs will fill the void and fight among themselves for control of the lucrative cocaine trade that kept the FARCwell-armed much longer than other Latin American insurgencies.

While Colombia’s homicide rate has fallen sharply over the years, it remains among the world’s deadliest countries, with violence driven largely by its status as the world’s top supplier of cocaine.

The much-smaller National Liberation Army will also remain active, although it’s pursuing a peace deal of its own.

Story: Andrea Rodriguez, Joshua Goodman