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ANNALS OF GEOPHYSICS, VOL. 47, N. 2/3, April/June 2004

Key words historical seismology – earthquakecatalogue

1. Italian earthquake catalogues up to 1980

1.1. From Roman paradoxographers toBonito’s Terra Tremante (1691)

The tradition of earthquake studies in Italyis very long; its origins go back to a classicalliterary genre known as «paradoxography» orcollection of marvels and curiosities (Pauly andWissowa, 1949). The earliest listings of Italianearthquakes were compiled by paradoxogra-phers such as Julius Obsequens, a Roman ofuncertain date but generally placed about themiddle of 4th century A.D., who gave an ac-count of the prodigies and portents that oc-curred in Rome between 249-12 B.C. The first«modern» Italian earthquake lists were includ-ed in treatises written in the aftermath of large(or even less than large) earthquakes, following

a vogue set by humanist Giannozzo Manetti inthe wake of the catastrophic Southern Italyearthquake of December 1456 (Manetti, 1457).Many such works were written in the 16th and17th centuries (table I), culminating in the bestand largest of them all, Terra Tremante (Bonito,1691), a worldwide compilation includingabout one hundred European earthquakes (sev-enty of them Italian) and some tens of reports ofearthquakes from Canada, China, Japan, Pana-ma, Peru and the Philippines. These are basedon large selections from original sources, oftentranscribed complete. The originals of some ofthese sources were later destroyed, which in-creases the usefulness of this great compilation.

1.2. The Age of Enlightement and NationalStates (18th-19th centuries)

From the 18th century to the first half of the19th century, earthquake listings go out of fash-ion. There is no lull in Italian seismicity (farfrom it, in fact) but - with a few remarkable ex-ceptions such as Mongitore (1743), on Sicilianearthquakes, and Soldani (1798) on Sienneseones – treatise writers seem more interested indebating whether earthquakes are caused by

Cataloguesof historical earthquakes in Italy

Romano CamassiIstituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia, Sezione di Milano, Sede di Bologna, Italy

AbstractA complete survey of historical earthquake investigation in Italy cannot be compressed into a few pages, sinceit would entail making a summary of widely different phases of research (performed by past scholars and bycontemporary scientists and historians) and taking into account the widely different historical contexts, method-ological assumptions and critical awareness of each of them. This short note only purposes to chart the mainstages of the progress made by Italian historical seismology, from the late 17th century compilation by Bonito(1691) up to the latest parametric catalogue (Working Group CPTI, 1999).

Mailing address: Dr. Romano Camassi, Istituto Nazionale diGeofisica e Vulcanologia, Sezione di Milano, Sede di Bologna,Via D. Creti 12, 40128 Bologna, Italy; e-mail: camassi@bo.ingv.it

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electricity or not, than in piling up macroseismicdata. This trend was reversed again in the secondhalf of the 19th century, thanks to the European-wide birth of national institutions for the study ofmeteorological and seismological phenomena(Camassi, 1991; Ferrari, 1992). In Italy, the cre-ation of the earliest observational networks in the1870s went hand in hand with the resumption oflarge scale collection of macroseismic data, firstadvocated by Alessandro Serpieri, Antonio Mal-vasia and Michele Stefano De Rossi. In 1874 DeRossi founded the Bullettino del VulcanismoItaliano, that only three years later could boast ofan 85-strong national network of correspon-dents. The Italian Central Meteorological Office(UCM) was created in 1876, and in 1887 itbranched out with a specialised GeodynamicService, becoming the Central Office for Meteo-rology and Geodynamics (UCMG).

By 1890 the Geodynamic Service networknumbered more than 900 stations and observato-ries, whose output (macroseismic questionnairesand reports) featured regularly (under the head-ing News of earthquakes observed in Italy) in theBulletin published from 1895 to 1913 by theItalian Seismological Society (founded in 1895).

1.3. Rounding up past knowledge: Baratta’sI Terremoti d’Italia (1901)

In the second half of the 19th century, alongwith the development of State-sponsored earth-quake-monitoring, the ancient tradition of earth-quake listing flourished anew in Italy (fig. 1) asin the rest of Europe, thanks to the groundbreak-ing efforts of people such as Hoff (1840-1841),

Perrey (1848), Mallet (1853, 1854, 1855), Vol-ger (1857), Schmidt (1879), Mercalli (1883),Kispatich (1891-1892), Baratta (1901) andmany others.

The huge compilation I terremoti d’Italia(Baratta, 1901) was the result of an Italy-wideresearch project carried out in 1896-1900 by thegeographer Mario Baratta with the help of alarge network of collaborators (mainly librari-ans and seismologists). Baratta personally con-ducted research in the UCMG library and themain libraries of Rome, Naples, Milan andPavia, while his collaborators sifted through lo-cal histories relevant to their locations to com-pile chronological earthquake lists from whichBaratta would select the items to be included inhis compilation.

Baratta’s personal archive was lost shortlyafter his death in 1935; the full list of his col-laborators is unknown, and it is hard to tell howmuch each contributed to the general effort.The reference list appended to Baratta (1901)shows more than 25% of the listed earthquakesto be derived from previous earthquake compi-lations (Pilla, 1846; Perrey, 1848; Guarini,1880; Mercalli, 1883; Piovene, 1888, Tommasi,1888, De Rossi, 1889; Baratta, 1897; Mercalli,1897a,b; Baratta, 1899; Benassi, 1899, etc; fora complete list see Guidoboni, 2000), and therest from historical compilations, standard col-lections of printed historical sources, scientificliterature and – in a few cases – seismologicalbulletins. In other words, Baratta (1901) is al-most entirely based on historical and seismo-logical compilations, mostly of a local and re-gional nature. Providing as it does a sort ofrounding up of past earthquake knowledge,

Compiler Earthquake Time span

Giannozzo Manetti (1457) 1456 Southern Italy Antiquity-1456

Colanello Pacca (1563) 1561 Val D’Agri Antiquity-1561

Pirro Ligorio (1574-1577) 1570 Ferrara Antiquity-1570

Filippo da Secinara (1652) 1646 L’Aquila Antiquity-1646

Marcello Bonito (1690) 1688 Campania Antiquity-1688

Table I. Main Italian compilers of earthquake lists in the 16th and 17th centuries.

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Geodynamic Service and started the slow butinexorable decline of state-sponsored earth-quake monitoring activities. From 1913 to 1943the Geodynamic Service continued to publishsummaries of its seismic data (lists of affectedlocalities and related intensities) in a successionof scientific magazines (table II) but this activi-ty did not survive the upheaval of the SecondWorld War. The original data collected byUCMG (seismic questionnaires and related pa-pers, letters, newspaper cuttings etc.) are todayheld partly by the National Institute for Geo-physics and Vulcanology (INGV), and partly bythe Central Office for Agrarian Ecology(UCEA, former UCMG).

Baratta (1901) stands as a watershed in Italianseismology, and played a key role in the estab-lishment of Italy’s «earthquake conscious-ness». More than a century after its publication,and despite having been found wrong on verymany occasions, this volume remains an au-thority Italian historical seismologists have stillto reckon with and still cannot do without.

1.4. The decline of the practice of systematicobservation

The First World War put an end to the prac-tice of collecting reports of earthquakes by the

Fig. 1. Geographical distribution of Italian seismological compilation from Bonito (1691) to Baratta (1901).

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1.5. The decade of parameters (1970s)

In the early 1970s Italian seismologists and ge-ologists started compiling parametric earthquakecatalogues for hazard estimation purposes, on a re-gional (Carrozzo et al., 1975; Bernardis et al.,1978; Iaccarino and Molin, 1978; Magri andMolin, 1979; Barbano et al., 1980; Dell’Olio eMolin, 1980; Molin, 1981; Margottini and Molin,1983; OGS, 1987) and national scale (Carrozzo etal., 1973) (fig. 2). Some of these catalogues wereunpublished, their use being restricted to the vari-ous Italian institutions that sponsored their compi-lation. Their focal parameters were mostly derivedfrom previous seismological compilations, barringa few instances of slightly more complex studiesfunded by the Italian National Nuclear EnergyCommittee (CNEN, afterwards ENEA) for select-ed areas (Friuli, Latium, Basilicata). Generallythese studies consisted in a «critical» re-assessmentof information miscellaneously derived from seis-mological compilations, local historiography, 19thcentury newspapers and seismological bulletins.

2. The first modern published Italiancatalogue (1985)

One of these catalogues, compiled on behalfof the Italian Electricity Agency (ENEL, 1978),

provided the starting point for the first modernsystematic revision of Italian earthquakes, un-dertaken after the destructive Irpinia earthquakeof 1980 by the «Catalogue Working Group» ofthe Progetto Finalizzato Geodinamica (PFG) ofthe National Research Council (CNR), under thechairmanship of Daniele Postpischl. The Work-ing Group’s aim was producing a revised nation-al parametric earthquake catalogue and detailedstudies of the major Italian historical earth-quakes. This experience was seminal in intro-ducing the involved researchers to the complexi-ties of historical research and fostering their ap-preciation of its practical uses. Some contentedthemselves with retrieving and appraising a feworiginal sources quoted by seismological compi-lations; others attempted wider-ranging biblio-graphical searches; a few enlisted the help ofprofessional historians to make the first attemptsat full-blown historical earthquake investigation,applying the methods of historical criticism toprimary historical sources. The variety of theseexperiences was reflected in the broad spectrumof quality shown by the output of the PFG proj-ect, which led to the publication of 81 mono-graph studies comprising in all about 6300 in-tensity datapoints (Postpischl, 1985a), and thePostpischl (1985b) catalogue.

The Postpischl (1985b) catalogue wascompiled by carefully collating the ENEL

Time span

Bullettino del Vulcanismo Italiano, voll. I (1874) - XX (1897), Roma 1874-1894

Notizie sismiche pervenute..., supplemento al Bollettino MeteoricoGiornaliero, Ufficio Centrale di Meteorologia, Roma 1887-1894

Notizie sui terremoti osservati in Italia durante l’anno..., Appendiceal Bollettino della Società Sismologica Italiana, Roma, Modena 1895-1913

Macrosismi avvertiti in Italia nell’anno..., Bollettino della SocietàSismologica Italiana, Roma 1916-1926

Bollettino Sismico, Ufficio Centrale di Meteorologia e Geofisica,Roma, fasc. II Macrosismi 1917-1936

Bollettino Sismico Settimanale, Ufficio Centrale di Meteorologia eGeofisica, Roma 1917-1943

Notizie sismiche, Bollettino della Società Sismologica Italiana,XXXIII(1935) - XXXVII(1939), Roma 1935-1939

Table II. Main seismological bulletins published in Italy from 1874 to 1943.

Title

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catalogues inserted in the Postpischl catalogueused the Medvedev-Sponheuer-Karník (MSK)scale. The Postpischl catalogue generallytakes its macroseismic magnitudes from theENEL catalogue, which derived them from in-tensity using Karník’s (1969) relation. Forseveral recent earthquakes the Postpischl cata-logue also reports ML magnitudes, derived ei-ther from bulletins or from one of the mainquoted sources.

The Postpischl (1985b) catalogue (again,like all parametric catalogues of its generation)is derived largely from the parameterisation of19th century seismological compilations, andprimarily from Baratta (1901). In fact, ananalysis of the Postpischl (1985b) catalogue forthe time-window prior to 1900 and the epicen-tral intensity threshold I0 ≥ V-VI MCS (tableIII) shows that more than 50% of the entries de-rive from Baratta (1901). As most of the para-metric catalogues merged in the Postpischl cat-

(1978) catalogue with several othernational/local parametric catalogues and thePostpischl (1985a) studies (fig. 3). It has theparamount merit of being a published cata-logue (the previous ones were all meant for re-stricted use only, or available only to scientif-ic institutions), making available for generaluse no less than 37 000 earthquake records.On the reverse side, like most early parametriccatalogues, it is very inhomogeneous (the in-crease in quantity of records having been paidfor in terms of lowered quality), it includesmany duplications and quite a few eventswhich further research has later shown to befictitious. Finally, the procedures used for as-sessing earthquake parameters are far fromtransparent. For example, the «intensity» pa-rameter is intended to be Imax, but sometimesit is derived as I0 from isoseismal lines. Thedeclared scale is Mercalli-Cancani-Sieberg(MCS), but in fact several of the parametric

Fig. 2. Main characteristics of Italian parametric earthquake catalogues from 1948 to 1985: the turning pointis the publication of the Karník catalogue which introduced a magnitude parameter. The type of macroseismicscale used (MCS or MSK) is not clearly reported, so in the Postpischl catalogue it comes out mixed.

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alogue derive from Baratta (1901) too (or fromsimilar compilations), it can be concluded thatapproximately 96% of the entries are supportedby Baratta (1901), and only about 2% by recentstudies based on the critical revision of histori-ography and primary historical sources.

3. The growth of historical seismology(1985-2000)

The first project of extensive historical in-vestigation dealing with some thousands ofearthquakes and involving academically trained

Reference Entries Percentage

Baratta (1901) 1195 51%

Other compilationsknown and quotedby Baratta (1901)

137 6%

Otherparametriccatalogues

922 39%

Postpischl (1985b) 52 2,2%

Personal comm. 43 1,8%

Table III. Analysis of the background of the Postpischl (1985b) catalogue (time window 1000-1899, I0 ≥ 5.5);the reference code analysed is the main one when multiple roots are available.

Fig. 3. Simplified filiation scheme of the Postpischl (1985b) catalogue.

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historians was carried out in 1983-1987 in theframe of an ENEL-sponsored feasibility studyfor the study of sites for the building of nuclearpower plants. This project, led by the former co-ordinating unit of the PFG Catalogue WorkingGroup (established as SGA), and supported byabout a hundred historians, focused on low seis-micity areas (Southern Piedmont, the Po valleyand the Salento peninsula). From 1988, the Na-tional Institute of Geophysics (ING) assumedthe sponsorship of the project, setting as its goalthe revision of all strong Italian earthquakes.

This study was carefully planned, taking in-to account the historical features and historicalsource potential of all areas potentially shakenby the earthquakes to be investigated. Thoughcarried out, in the main, by earthquake, exten-sive investigations by source were also made inseveral archives and libraries (mainly for the an-cient and medieval periods). This allowed theacquisition of detailed knowledge of manykinds of sources, essential for the correct inter-pretation of historical records. All investigationsshould have been performed according to a pre-set standard and were co-ordinated by a singlemanaging team. The collected historical recordswere compiled according to a pre-set patternthat allowed them to be inserted in a databank.

The main outcomes of this project were acollection of studies on Mediterranean earth-quakes before 1000 A.D. (Guidoboni, 1989;Guidoboni et al., 1994) and the first edition ofthe Catalogue of Strong Italian Earthquakes(Boschi et al., 1995), a modern database (onCD-ROM) providing studies on 346 majorearthquakes, supported by a large bibliographyand (in some cases) by transcriptions of originalsources. The second edition (Boschi et al.,1997) provided studies for 559 earthquakes (in-cluding some updates on the 1995 issue). Thethird edition (Boschi et al., 2000), published asa special issue of the journal Annali di Geofisi-ca, provides studies for fifty more earthquakes(mostly located in the Northern and Umbro-Marchesan Apennines) and several updates ofstudies included in the previous issues, but un-fortunately no transcriptions of originalsources. In the last few years the research groupresponsible also published monographs dealingwith the seismic history of Italian regions

(Boschi et al., 1998) and towns (Boschi andGuidoboni, 2001, 2003).

A sister project was undertaken in 1986 bythe National Group for Protection againstEarthquakes (GNDT), then attached to the Ital-ian Council for National Research (CNR), nowa branch of the National Institute of Geophysicsand Vulcanology (INGV). This was the launchof a five-yearly «Macroseismic project» involv-ing a large number of academically-trained his-torians, some as full-time investigators, andothers as members of university research unitsprovided with ad-hoc grants. The project aimedto prepare: i) in-depth studies of a selection ofearthquakes each of which was a «key event»for hazard assessment in a given moderatelyseismic area; ii) standard and homogeneouspreliminary studies of all earthquakes listed bythe Postpischl (1985b) catalogue with I0 ≥ VII-VIII MCS; iii) a database of macroseismic dataand a parametric catalogue specifically de-signed for hazard purposes. Some of the earth-quakes concerned had already been studied byvarious agencies after 1980, and intensitypoints had been assessed for them. However, noless than 600 of these earthquakes had neverbeen studied and no intensity points were extantfor them. All the available earthquake studieswere retrieved and the intensity data they pro-vided were re-compiled in a standard format.The 600 earthquakes without intensity pointswere studied for the first time ever. At the endof the work, a careful analysis of the macro-seismic procedures employed was also made, topoint out weaknesses and suggesting possiblesolutions (Stucchi and Albini, 1991).

The resulting «NT» catalogue was first re-leased as a working file in 1993 (Stucchi et al.,1993) and published in 1997 (Camassi andStucchi, 1997a). In 1998 an updated version ofthe catalogue was made available online(http://emidius.mi.ingv.it/NT/) together withthe whole Database of Macroseismic Observa-tions «DOM» (Monachesi and Stucchi, 1997),which includes more than 36 000 datapoints re-lating to 1000 damaging Italian earthquakes(http://emidius.mi.ingv.it/DOM/). The NT4.1and DOM web pages, still existing and widelyused by researchers, allow users to downloaddata, to query the catalogue and the database in

ground of any. The matchless wealth of theItalian historical documentary patrimony andthe frequency with which destructive earth-quakes have affected the Italian territory inhistorical times are the two mainsprings forthe age-old Italian tradition of historical-seis-mological studies (Guidoboni and Stucchi,1993; Guidoboni et al., 1994). As Guidoboniet al. (1994) points out, it is possible to findcomparatively well documented earthquakesas far back in time as the 6th century B.C.,thanks to evidence available in several kindsof sources, epigraphical, literary and archaeo-logical (Guidoboni, 2000). Between the 8thcentury A.D. and the 15th century the mainsources of information are at first somewhatlimited, and mostly of a narrative kind (annalsand chronicles). But with the passing of time,they steadily grow more detailed, varied inkind, and abundant in numbers, embracing theadministrative records of city-states and theChurch, and numerous serial sources of re-markable consistency, such as chronicles anddiaries. During the first half of the 16th centu-ry the earliest newsletter networks come intobeing, in the shape of manuscript reports(«Avvisi») exchanged between several Italianand European courts. The first half of the 17thcentury sees also the birth of the modernprinted gazettes (Camassi and Caracciolo,1994; Camassi and Castelli, 2004), connectedin a network whose main nodes are Rome,Florence, Bologna, Mantova, Genoa, Veniceand Milan.

Selling news becomes a profitable activityin the 18th and 19th centuries and the popular-ity of printed gazettes is testified by the preser-vation of large collections in Italian librariesand archives.

In the second half of the 19th century, as waspreviously mentioned, the creation of nationalmeteorological and seismological networks leadto the building up of a large amount of macro-seismic observations, which to this day has still tobe exploited fully. After the drastic decline ofearthquake investigation caused by the SecondWorld War, and perpetuated during the 1960s and1970s, the activities started by the PFG project inthe 1980s represents a «new birth» of the Italiantradition of seismological studies.

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different ways and to plot the observed seismichistory for about 2000 localities.

From 1989 to 1992 the GNDT research groupwas also the leading team of the EC projectRHISE (Review of Historical Seismicity in Eu-rope), co-ordinated by M. Stucchi (Stucchi,1993b), whose output is available both in bookform (Stucchi, 1993a, Albini and Moroni, 1994)and online (http://mi.ingv.it/RHISE/ home.html).From 1995 to 1998 the same team led the ECproject BEECD (Basic European Earthquake Cat-alogue and Data Base), which led to the prepara-tion of an European Macroseismic database andto a detailed analysis of the problems to be ex-pected when merging together different kinds ofcatalogues or intensity data sets produced by sev-eral authors and in variable contexts (Camassi andStucchi, 1997b; Albini and Stucchi, 1997).

During this period, valuable studies of his-torical earthquakes have also been performedby other teams and institutions. The VesuvianObservatory (now an INGV department) pub-lished an outstanding study of the 1456 earth-quake (Figliuolo, 1988), one of the largest thatever affected the Italian peninsula, and whosemain characteristics (as reconstructed byMeletti et al., 1988) stimulated seismologiststo speculate on its possibly being a sequenceof multiple, sub-contemporary earthquakes,the assessment of whose focal parameters re-quires special care. The same team also re-cently published a study of Southern Italy Ear-ly Medieval earthquakes (Figliuolo and Martu-rano, 2002) The National Seismic Survey(SSN) published monumental monographs ofsome major 19th-20th century earthquakes(Castenetto et al., 1998; Castenetto and Gala-dini, 1999; Castenetto and Sebastiano, 2002).

In 1999 the «CPTI» catalogue (WorkingGroup CPTI, 1999) was published, which is an up-dated version of NT4.1, compiled with the agree-ment of the whole Italian seismological communi-ty as embodied in GNDT, ING(V) and SSN.

4. The historical background of the currentItalian catalogue

The Italian seismic catalogue can boast ofwhat is probably the best historical back-

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However, the bulk of the current parametriccatalogue still remains to some extent a reflec-tion of the complex historical-seismologicaltradition of earthquake compilations sum-marised by Baratta (1901). Most of the CPTIcatalogue entries for the time window up to1899 are those known to Baratta (1901), and inquite a few cases recent research – howevercareful and well-balanced – has not been ableeither to alter or to improve the pattern of infor-mation already made available by Baratta(1901). These facts have an evident bearing onthe assessment of catalogue completeness,which is a significant question for hazard esti-mation. As already mentioned, Baratta (1901)was a huge collector of data, mostly derivedfrom previous historical and seismological

5. What next?

In the last twenty-odd years, the contribu-tion made by Italian historical-seismologicalstudies to general earthquake knowledge hastaken two main directions. Advanced historicalinvestigations have been made available for alarge number of earthquakes (1070 in the CPTIcatalogue, out of a total of 2480 entries). Allthe strongest Italian earthquakes are now sup-ported by recent historical investigations andintensity data (fig. 4). Furthermore, approxi-mately 250 fictitious earthquakes have beendetected and «put away» (such fakes are pres-ent in quantity both in the «classical» earth-quake compilations and in the first generationof parametric earthquake catalogues).

Fig. 4. Distribution of entries in CPTI catalogue (Working Group CPTI, 1999) without a supporting dataset: all22 earthquakes with M ≥ 5.5 are located in the border part of the space window covered by the catalogue.

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compilations of a local character. The geo-graphical distribution of the main historical andseismological compilations from which Barattadrew his raw data (see fig. 1) gives at least arough idea of the coverage they afford for thedifferent parts of Italy. Their density is remark-ably higher in northern and (up to a point) cen-

tral Italy than in southern Italy. Another factorwhich deeply impaired the level of complete-ness achieved by Baratta’s work was the lack ofa systematic approach to the study of serialsources, especially gazettes and newspapers.This is true equally of Baratta and the 19th cen-tury compilations on which he relied most heav-ily (Perrey, 1848; De Rossi, 1889; Baratta,1899). In this regard, it is interesting to note thatthese studies were doomed from the start bytheir use of incomplete collections of gazettesand newspapers in the first place (fig. 5).

It is a legitimate assumption that if the cur-rent catalogue is (and it is), on the whole, afaithful mirror of Baratta (1901), and through itof the «seismological tradition» embodied in thepre-Baratta compilations, it cannot avoid beingaffected by the same faults and lacunae. It istherefore advisable to devise specific strategiesaimed at detecting those earthquakes that haveremained until now «unknown» to the seismo-logical tradition (Camassi and Castelli, 2004).

6. Conclusions

After twenty years of historical research alarge amount of historical-seismological data isnow available in Italy, most of it published ormade available in public databases. The data-base which supports the CPTI catalogue con-tains more then 50 000 intensity data points(≈ 11 000 prior to 1880, table IV) assessed in arather homogeneous way on the basis of histor-ical sources, most of them primary.

Recent Italian earthquake catalogues canrely on a good basis of macroseismic data andhave adopted clearer and more transparent

Fig. 5. Time-coverage of the Gazette de France collection perused by Alexis Perrey (1848) compared with thecollection actually available.

Time Period CPTIcatalogue

CPTIdatabase

< 1000 24 54

1000-1099 5 16

1100-1199 15 127

1200-1299 28 131

1300-1399 51 229

1400-1499 70 385

1500-1599 103 489

1600-1699 130 1732

1700-1799 262 3146

1800-1850 185 2064

1851-1899 450 8603

1900-1963 878 19 917

1964-1992 279 16 640

Total 2480 53 533

Table IV. Number of earthquakes in the CPTI cat-alogue (Working Group CPTI, 1999) and number ofintensity data points in the corresponding database.

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procedures in the parameterisation of histori-cal records.

The NT4.1 catalogue (Camassi and Stucchi,1997a) derives its parameters from intensity da-ta points for about 1000 earthquakes; the proce-dures adopted for deriving parameters from in-tensity data are not particularly sophisticated,but they are at least clearly expressed. The mainmagnitude provided is Ms, which can be ob-served or calculated from Io or from other kindsof magnitude (ML, mb).

The CPTI catalogue (Working Group CPTI,1999), adopting the Gasperini and Ferrari(2000) parameterisation method, represents asignificant advance in the formalisation of theprocedures for the definition of parameters,which, for the first time ever, are reproducible.

Today seismologists are submitting newquestions to historical seismology and new re-search perspectives are in progress, on cata-logue completeness, apparently silent areas,minor earthquakes, unknown earthquakes, etc.,involving also new disciplines, as in the fieldsof archaeoseismology and paleoseismology.

Acknowledgements

The author wish to thank V. Castelli, the tworeviewers and the editors for their careful revi-sion of the manuscript and their suggestions.

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