Nearly two years, ago, the city of L’Aquila, Italy was hit by a major earthquake, destroying much of the city. Today, most of the city remains in ruins.

Barnaby Gunning has created a website, Comefacciamo, to encourage people to build out the entire city in 3D in its current state. As you may have seen on the SketchUp Blog last week, they’ve already accomplished quite a bit. For example, check out the images below of the Santa Maria Paganica to see just how well-detailed some of these models are:

A few days ago, Google organized a workshop to help volunteers learn how to use the various modeling tools available to them. One of the best tools to help model L’Aquila is Building Maker, which recently added the city to it’s growing list of available areas. For a bit more on how to use that, check out these getting started videos.

If you’d like more imagery for your models, you’ll want to look at this page on the Comefacciamo site, which has hundres of high-res images of the buildings in the city.

For more info, you can fly to L’Aquila in Google Earth using this KML file, visit the L’Aquila 3D site or get more info from this post in the SketchUp Blog.