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Chapter 2 Upside-Down Landscapes Seismicity and Seismic Disasters in Italy Emanuela Guidoboni La storia non è fatta da chi la pensa e neppure da chi la ignora. [History is made neither by those who think about it nor by those who ignore it.] —Eugenio Montale, Satura I Problems linked to the environment are generally regarded as being visible or predictable:they concern the uses of the landscape,its transformations , the economic exploitation of the lands or waters, and even lifestyles and visions of economic development. But the environment is not only the result of what can be seen or planned. There are also hidden geological features, such as the ones that cause earthquakes and strongly influence the inhabited world. We have no direct perception of this underground landscape (located from a few to a dozen kilometers beneath the earth’s crust); we have only indirect knowledge of it, and a distorted knowledge at that. Our knowledge of earthquakes is constructed partly by way of the effects that shape our inhabited surface world and partly by way of various types of instrumental data that reveal different aspects of the phenomenon. The earthquake landscape can be defined as subterranean and hence only partially perceived, not only because earthquakes originate underground but also because various social and cultural norms tend to ignore (or underestimate ) them as ever-present features of the inhabited countryside.  | Emanuela Guidoboni Earthquakes are wholly natural, frequent phenomena of life on earth, at times turning into disasters that trigger economic and social crises or harm the lifestyles and livelihoods of the people affected by them.However, the relationship between earthquakes and disasters is equivocal,as multiple preexisting economic, social, and cultural factors combine to form a “disaster ” as such. Because of their geographic diffusion, their frequency, and the sheer scope of the damage they cause, earthquakes represent one of the least understood aspects of Italy’s environment in terms of the relationship between human society and the natural environment. To date, Italian academic historiography has not turned earthquakes into a research topic, but over the past twenty years historical research has become an important component in the science of seismology. Interestingly , scientific questions were the motivation for bringing history into play in seismology. Earthquake science requires a record of events occurring over long periods in order to identify active seismic areas and to predict possible future magnitudes. The data now available for Italy date back some two thousand years (with sporadic information from earlier periods); their quality and frequency are rather variable, depending on the places and periods. Consequently, indirect information about earthquakes that historians have traditionally neglected is now being uncovered: descriptions of early building types, ruins, collapses, reconstructions, abandonments, social and economic trends, and administrative and political responses involving both local inhabitants and distant governments. Earthquakes have given rise to a new discipline, one that poses new questions arising from freshly unearthed archival information. Through such research, ancient and medieval seismic landscapes are emerging from obscurity. Today, we certainly have a much better understanding of earthquakes and their impact on human history, especially in Italy. The Birth of a New Discipline: Historical Seismology For centuries, scholars and literati have taken an interest in ancient and medieval earthquakes, and during the last two centuries, seismologists and geologists have also turned to earthquake history. But only since the late 1980s has this field emerged as a new discipline, now known as historical seismology, founded and developed on the ideas and research methodologies of historians today. Three factors have contributed to the development of this new field: (1) seismologists’ demand for long-term earthquake data (instrumental data have registered only twenty or so mid- to large-sized earthquakes in Italy over the past few decades); (2) the systematic identification and cataloging of thousands of earthquakes in Italy, starting from Seismicity and Seismic Disasters in Italy |  the fifth century BC; and (3) the identification and availability of resources adequate for such research. In the systematic historical study of past earthquakes, it is impossible to ignore the particular viewpoint of the earth sciences, just as it is impossible to use traditional historical methods (another reason for developing a new field). It has required the establishment of specialized research groups and the capacity to store and manage the data in specific databases. Scientific issues have also stimulated different uses of the historical sources, challenging the anthropocentric vision that characterizes a great deal of environmental history in Italy. The goal of historical seismology is to...

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