Every now and then we all become something of experts in seismology and geology, picking our way among articles, pundits and specialists, and so we look at maps of the national and regional territory in which, amid colors and statistics, we are reminded that Italy is a land subject to earthquakes.
From the north-east down to Sicily, by way of the Umbria-Marche Apennines and the border between Campania and Basilicata: these are areas very different from one another in landscape and culture, yet in each of them the people remember, even a few generations on, the day of the "great earthquake".
With every event the spotlights come back on, we hope there will be no dead to mourn, and the ifs and buts that accompany every tragedy begin, as we try to trace the line between prediction and prevention for our heritage of human lives and of buildings, historic and residential alike.
The thread that links one seismic event to another is often left in shadow: real-time reporting is preferred, and the historical annals then slip back into oblivion, as though we wished to set aside a reality that nevertheless remains indelible. After the earthquake, human activities resume their course and, if all goes according to plan, what was destroyed is rebuilt; yet that thread persists, and it is what should be recalled to everyone who lives in municipalities of high seismicity, remembering that ours is a "fragile" country that for centuries has had to face natural events that are unpredictable but preventable.
Italy's historical earthquake records (http://istituto.ingv.it/l-ingv/archivi-e-banche-dati/) tell of stories and events that collective memory cannot easily retain, starting as far back as the second century BC and coming down to our own day with an ever larger and more detailed body of information.
Consulting them, one discovers terrible shakings of the earth. To narrow the analysis we may look at central Italy alone, where Umbria, Marche, Abruzzo and Lazio prove to be, beyond the recent news, regions bordering on the great faults of the Apennines, which push the rocks against one another until stress breaks the equilibrium, releasing the accumulated energy in a few interminable seconds and robbing us of many of our certainties and of our peace of mind.

These certainties have been broken many times, as we have said, and among the first that the INGV (the National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology) records for us is dated 102 BC, with its epicenter at Norcia: these are chronicles of monasteries or of historiographers registering every event that struck the community, at times lacking details on the damage to people and property, yet remaining fundamental testimony for becoming aware of the world in which one lives.
With the centuries the information grows richer in detail, with dates and counts of the dead: the terrible event of 1349, with a magnitude (recalculated, of course, from the instrumental history of the place and from the description of the damage) of 7.6 on the Richter scale and at least 2,500 victims; and the event of 1456 is also remembered, in which the death of 80,000 people is feared. From the authoritative testimony of Father Andrea Bina, taken up in the studies of Mario Baratta, considered the founder of Italian historical seismology, comes the description of the 1751 earthquake in central Italy, which brought destruction and death across the whole territory.
The years go by and the events follow one another, with varying intensities and epicenters, describing and confirming that this piece of Italy keeps moving independently of all human activity, sometimes disastrously, sometimes less so, but forcing people every time to rebuild and to take up daily life again.
In the modern age, ever more advanced instruments and communication systems bring us to the front line, making us follow the drama of the earthquake, and with the internet we can follow even the smallest tremors, below magnitude 2.5 to 3 on the Richter scale (normally the minimum threshold for human perception): we count hundreds of tremors across Italy every day, sometimes even within a few hours.
When the great event arrives, all the media seem to describe a new story, one that has nothing to do with the previous one or, worse, with the one to come. The media fill up with prophets who say they knew it, and we all ask ourselves whether they were right or not and, unfortunately, we are surprised once again by an event that has "inhabited" these places for far longer than we have.
There is always a risk of rhetoric in these terrible moments, but the objective truth must not be denied: the force of nature cannot be placated or calculated, yet we must know how to contain it with concrete preventive measures, above all in the historic villages which, given the age of their construction, are most at risk, and we must prepare every new dwelling to face an event that sooner or later will strike the ground beneath us.

Some cite Japan, asking how it is that they are so well prepared while Italy is unable to act preventively. The answer is provided by Prof. Yoshiteru Murosaki, professor of engineering at the University of Kyoto, in the pages of Corriere della Sera of 31/08/2016, who states: "I have the impression that in Italy… a true culture of prevention at the level of the ordinary citizen is still rather lacking. Of course, your country has a much older building stock than ours, and so it is not easy to adapt it to the needs of the present. But it is indispensable that the authorities, at every level, see to it that the anti-seismic rules are rigorously respected: this is the only way to save, one day, the greatest number of human lives. And of buildings too."
The elements are clear and irrefutable: in Italy we must live with the awareness that we may feel an earthquake at any moment, and for this we must be prepared, not only to bring rescue, with the machinery of civil protection, but to be conscientious in the way new buildings are constructed, so that they suit the place where they rise, and to invest better in the heritage of historic buildings and older houses, doing everything possible to keep them safe. Work on a building's elastic capacity, the lightening of the roof or of the floors, and many other measures which, however small, can be enough to give those inside time to escape; because it is true that, as has been done for centuries, what collapses will be rebuilt, but we must not run the risk of losing a human life, because a life can only be mourned.

Riccardo Barletta – Born in Trani, in Puglia, in 1984, he moved to Tuscany in 2003 to study geology at the University of Siena. He has studied and worked in the field of geology and the environment, with a commitment to raising awareness and knowledge of the Italian territory.