La percezione dei terremoti del 1703 nelle fonti giornalistiche coeve

Abstract

At the start of the Eighteenth century, in Italy and Europe, there is a flourishing journalistic industry whose main products are printed gazettes and monographic pamphlets addressed to a comparatively wide public of general readers. In previous centuries, journalistic sources of a kind where available too, mainly as handwritten newsletters, but these were meant only for a restricted clientele (diplomats, merchants and suchlike) wealthy enough to afford to pay in order to keep abreast of foreign occurrences thanks to an European-wide network of professional “informers”. During the second half of Seventeenth century an “information revolution” occurred as the target of the information market widened and became more popular; the invention of the earliest newspapers allowed the general public to get access to information on events outside its immediate range of knowledge. Among the many momentous consequences of this historical process there is one that holds great interest for the purposes of historical seismology, namely the enhancement of the chances of retrieving contemporary and reliable testimonies on seismic events. This paper focuses on the journalistic coverage of the great Italian earthquakes of 1703, analysing it systematically and checking its informative content. The results of the study points out the originality of the informative contribution to be drawn from journalistic sources and also helps discovering how much the information derived from these sources influenced the building up of the image of the 1703 earthquakes by later historical and seismological studies.