The investigation of potential earthquake sources in peninsular Italy: A review

We summarise and discuss almost a century of progress in the understanding of the main characteristics of large Italian earthquakes. Topics of discuss ion include (1) the distribution of the largest earthquakes in relation wit h Late Pleistocene and Holocene faulting, (2) the geological and tectonic s etting of the 1908 Messina Straits, 1915 Fucino Plain and 1980 Irpinia eart hquakes, (3) some of the geodynamic motivations for the characteristics of Italian seismicity, and (4) the resulting implications for the assessment o f seismic hazard. In a subsequent section of the paper we present a summary of recent achievements in the understanding and characterization of Italia n seismicity, with special emphasis on the assignment of large historical e arthquakes to specific sources identified through geological observations a nd on the evaluation of average recurrence intervals for individual earthqu ake sources. The final section describes some of the efforts being made for matching the newly acquired geological evidence with instrumental and hist orical observations of Italian seismicity and the hypotheses than can be de rived for anticipating the locus of large earthquakes of the future.