At dawn of September 26, 1933, a strong earthquake struck the southeastern area of the Majella massif, in Abruzzo, damaging heavily several villages, with extensive destruction in Lama dei Peligni, Taranta Peligna and Civitella Messer Raimondo. In the past, this area was hit by a powerful earthquake (1706; Mw=6.6), with a similar mesoseismic area, although with much higher site intensities. Therefore, it is likely that the two events share the same seismogenic source that has remained unknown, so far.

The 1933 mainshock occurred at 4:33 AM local time, and was providentially preceded by two foreshocks that alarmed the inhabitants, prompting most of them to escape from their houses. Notwithstanding the large amount of collapses and destructions (Fig. 1), this yielded a relatively little death toll (12 casualties, and less than two hundred injured).

In order to enhance the knowledge concerning the highest intensity distribution (Is≥7 MCS), and thus indirectly enlighten the rough location of the causative fault, here we carried out a review of the data collected in the Catalogue of Strong Earthquake in Italy (CFTI4Med; Guidoboni et al., 2007). As the main source in all the previous studies were the information listed in the newspapers and the works of Cavasino (1935a, 1935b), we performed original archive researches that allowed us to collect new reliable data.