L'AQUILA, Italy - During the daytime the camps which house those made homeless by the earthquake appear fairly cheerful places. The sun shines, children throw balls and play with toys, clowns roam up and down the rows of tents injecting their little bit of fun, people sit outside the tents reading the papers. But this is the daytime.

Survivors of this week's Italian earthquake are living in tented villages and asking when they can return home.

At night, it is bitterly cold. There are whole families of 12, if not more, crowded into the tents, wearing the same clothes as they were wearing four days ago when the earthquake struck. They are cold and the aftershocks bring panic. When you look at their eyes in the mornings, they are red and bloodshot, all on the verge of tears. All the time.

We were in the camp registration tent earlier when a man came in and began shouting. He wanted to get back into his home, he asked why couldn't he just collect his things? The aid worker replied: "Thirty-thousand people want to get back into their homes, what can I do?"

I asked a lady I'd profiled in a report on Wednesday whether she'd managed to sleep last night. "How can I sleep when the earth won't stop moving?" she said.

People say they are being well looked after. I've seen handouts of all sorts of Italian delicacies - the finest buffalo mozarella, panettone... Only in Italy, I thought.

The toilets and shower facilities are as clean as they can be in a camp which houses more than 1,000 people. There are medical tents and pharmacies on site, psychologists offer walk-in services, an order of Franciscan monks arrived this morning to provide spiritual support. They're having to sleep in one tent too: their monastery was damaged in the quake.

But the misery here is profound and the grief will go on. Tomorrow many of the victims will be buried in a mass funeral. It's Good Friday tomorrow. A terrible Easter for so many thousands of people in this deeply Catholic country.

Posted by: CNN Correspondent, Diana Magnay
Filed under: Italy •Natural Disasters