In the wake of a big quake

Abstract

The 18th-century European press network functioned in a non-linear way: newspapers tended to publish news from far-off countries rather than those of merely local interest. Thus, some Italian news may be only reported in non-Italian gazettes, or Italian gazettes omit to report some interesting details that reach instead – via the underground network of handwritten reports and diplomatic correspondence – some foreign gazettes. On the other hand, however, exaggerations or outright hoaxes are frequent both in Italian and non-Italian gazettes. In order to understand how journalistic communication functioned and how the traces of some earthquakes were collected and preserved by seismological compilations, we examined the output of several Italian and European gazettes in the months after the great Lisbon earthquake of 1 November 1755. During this period the European press network overflows with reports of the effects of the “big one” in Portugal and abroad, and also publish a spate of news of other earthquakes in Europe and the Mediterranean area. Some - the 9 December 1755 Valais earthquake, the 13 February 1756 Rhodos, and the 18 February Düren earthquakes - were real enough and quite strong too. Others were minor or - in some cases - even wholly fictitious events. Our survey discovers the traces of a few earthquakes still unknown to the current parametric catalogues and allows us to reevaluate an earthquake that turns out to represent the historical maximum for the city of Treviso (Veneto, Italy).