Earthquake in Italy: How Natural Disaster Are Interpreted and Remembered

Abstract

This thesis examines the ways in which earthquakes have been culturally remembered in Italy since the massive Messina earthquake of 1908. It starts from the observation that cultural memory studies have focussed on ‘man made’ traumatic events thereby overlooking the ways in which natural disasters too have been subject to remembrance and commemoration and their meaning contested. The thesis shows indeed that ever since the 18th-century Lisbon earthquake, earthquakes have been ‘culturized’, that is, represented and interpreted within semantic frameworks which highlight their meaning for later generations, often deploying complex strategies in order to make sense of what seems senseless and beyond the ken of mankind. The thesis then goes on to examine in considerable detail the ways in which two major earthquakes in 20th-century Italy (Messina 1908; Irpinia 1980) were represented in a variety of media both through contemporary reports and through later forms of mediated recollection. It shows very clearly the procedures whereby the two earthquakes were interpreted and, most interestingly, connected to the Italian political landscape and especially to issues surrounding the North-South relations and the trustworthiness of the Italian State. It also shows how the recollection of later events was mediated through the memory of earlier ones (and vice versa), hence demonstrating the non-linear and multidirectional character of the cultural memory processes at work. In contrasting the recollection of the Irpinia disaster with that of the Bologna bombing, both events from 1980, the thesis demonstrates both the different issues at work in the recollection of natural as distinct from purely man-made disasters, at the same time as it shows the interconnectedness between them.