Large tsunamis and tsunami hazard from the new Italian tsunami catalog

A new catalog of the Italian tsunamis has been recenty published (Tinti and Maramai, 1996) following criteria established in the frame of the EU GITEC project for a unified catalog of the European tsunamis. The catalog differ s remarkably from the previous compilations of the Italian tsunamis that we re due to Caputo and Faita (1984) and to Bedosti and Caputo (1986), the mai n difference concerning the number of events: the present version includes only 67 events of which 32 are certain (reliability class 4 in Iida's scale ), whereas the rest are affected by various degree of uncertainty (reliabil ity from 0 to 3). Only two catastrophic events are well documented (the 6 F ebruary 1783 Calabria tsunami and the 28 December 1908 Messina Straits tsun ami), but several more resulted to be disastrous or relevant. Large events are reexamined and the catalog is analysed in view of the hazard implied fo r the Italian coastlines and the related suitable mitigation strategies. Th e regions with the highest number of observed tsunamis happens to be the Ae olian islands and the Liguria-Cote d'Azur, while the events associated with the largest waves were observed in the Messina Straits, the Tyrrhenian Cal abria and the Gargano promontory. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.