THE SHADOW-ZONE OF LARGE ITALIAN EARTHQUAKES. EARLY JOURNALISTIC SOURCES AND THEIR PERCEPTION OF 17TH-18TH CENTURIES SEISMICITY

From their earliest beginnings in the 16th century, journalists never failed to find earth-quakes interesting. As a result, early journalistic sources offer a huge hoard of original earthquake data, mostly untapped to this day for seismological purposes Camassi and Castelli, 2003]. In the aftermath of large earthquakes, the journalists of the 17th and 18th centuries tended to react in two ways. Either their interest for seismic news would increase, leading them to hunt for more news of the same kind, or it would focus exclusively on the “big one” to the detriment of lesser contemporary earthquakes. In the first case, it was possible that more earthquakes than usual would be given coverage; but in the second case more earthquakes than usual were likely to be overlooked and shadowed by the larger event. Through a comprehensive cross-check of Italian early journalistic sources, this paper attempts to highlight the “shadow-zones” of some major 17th–18th centuries Italian earthquakes.