The 1908 Messina Straits Earthquake: Cornerstones and the Need to Step Forward

The Mw 7.1 earthquake that on 28 December 1908 struck the cities of Messina and Reggio Calabria, facing each other across the Messina Straits, was one of the most destructive events of the past century and one of the deadliest earthquakes in human history, causing a huge death toll, estimated from 60,000 to >100,000 (Bertolaso et al., 2008). None of the large earthquakes that occurred in Europe in the twentieth century, some of them with larger magnitudes (Grünthal and Wahlström, 2012), resulted to be as deadly as the Messina earthquake, which sparked a wave...