ASMI Archivio Storico Macrosismico ItalianoItalian Archive of Historical Earthquake Data

The Catalogue lists earthquakes that occurred in Italy between 461 B.C. and 1997, and earthquakes that occurred in the general Mediterranean area between the VIII century b.C. and the XV century. This version (CFTI5Med) features: the retrieval and formatting of over 23,000 original bibliographic documents, transcribed or printed, nearly 50% of those utilized in the CFTI5Med. These documents are now available on-line as fully searchable pdf files; a full geological reinterpretation, georeferencing and reprocessing of over 2,300 descriptions of earthquake-induced environmental effects, which are now all available and searchable in a user-friendly web-GIS environment; the elaboration of a number of texts and commentaries that were missing from the CFTI4Med version of the catalogue; a totally re-designed and more efficient web- and web-GIS interface. The new Catalogo dei Forti Terremoti in ltalia includes 1,259 earthquakes that occurred in Italy (98 of which are currently considered false). No commentaries on the main earthquake effects were available in the previous version of the catalogue for 87 of such events as they had not been updated with respect to the information supplied in Guidoboni e Comastri (2005) for the 1000 AD-1500 AD time interval. The commentaries concerning the most significant effects of Italian medieval earthquakes have now been elaborated and are available along with the information on more recent events. For the remainder of the earthquakes first presented with the CFTI4Med - those that occurred in the general Mediterranean area away from the Italian coasts - the new catalogue provides only the felt reports and basic epicentral parameters.

The earthquake of October 3, 1943, is an important event for characterization of hazard in central Italy, but none of the earlier studies provide an exhaustive description of its effects. The context in which the earthquake occurred was very complex and many relevant records were not available for consultation when the studies were made. This study set out to improve our understanding of the earthquake and its effects by giving special care to the interpretative problems deriving from the peculiar historical and seismological context of the 1943 earthquake, with reference to the possible interactions between earthquake damage and war damage, and between the effects of the 1943 earthquake and those of other local earthquakes occurred between 1936 and 1951. The historical data set collected by earlier studies was critically revised and more data were sought in repositories that had not been previously considered. The number of localities for which a macrosesmic intensity can be assessed increased from 131 to 170. All intensity values were reassessed; from these we calculate a new macroseismic magnitude Mw 5.5 of the October 3, 1943, earthquake.