Resumen de Il Terremoto del 1511 in Friuli
On the 27th March 1511, the Italian region of Friuli was hit by a devastating earthquake, which provoked dispersed damage, widespread destruction and several hundreds of victims. The seismic activity involved all major urban centers, although the area in which the event had a major impact seems to be the one surrounding the alpine and piedmont belt. Because of its extraordinary intensity, the 1511 earthquake deeply shook people’s consciousness to the extent that it was considered an exceptional event and the most frightening and severe disaster that the Friulian population had ever experienced. However, the peculiarity of this earthquake resides beyond the material damages that it provoked and has to be traced back to the relationship that several people of the time established with the blood-filled peasants’ revolt. The rebellion burst out one month earlier on the Carnival day of Fat Thursday and it led to the death of tens of Friulian nobles. Numerous authors of the time gave an account of the revolt within narratives and chronicles in which they left considerable space for the description of the following earthquake, interpreted by the contemporaries as a divine punishment for the matters that occurred. This chronicle-based corpus of sources, together with public documentation produced by the most important municipal administrations, has been thoroughly examined in an unprecedented and systematic way, in order to understand the actual size and impact of the event, the exact duration of the earthquake, as well as the number and intensity of the aftershocks. This is particularly crucial in order to provide an overall view of the immediate consequences upon the entire region, including a reasonable estimation of the number of casualties. The aim of this study is not only to portray an exhaustive picture of the impact that the mournful event had upon Friulian society, but also to investigate in depth how a catastrophe of this dimension has been experienced, faced and dealt with by the major communities of the region, examined one by one, according to the availability of sources.
