ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Drawing earthquakes: Mario Baratta and Torquato Taramelli. The birth of Italian seismic cartography through maps, archives, and public policy

• In Event: The Plural Worlds of Earth Science: Visual, Material, and Institutional Transformations Across Disciplines, Scales, and Territories 1

English Abstract

This presentation aims to highlight the role played by Italian seismic cartography, since the early decades following national unification, in the debate on forms of knowledge and land management by the state. It will examine some unpublished and little-known seismic maps created by Mario Baratta, together with a collection of manuscripts preserved at the Italian Meteorology and Seismology Documentation Center.
The first part of the talk will focus on the importance of the Italian method for the production of maps, catalogs, and classification systems for seismic events, characterized by an interdisciplinary approach that integrates field observations, geomorphological analyses, and historical research on archival sources. The result was a cartographic model deeply connected to the geological structure and long history of seismic activity, capable of providing a classification of the national territory that integrated for the first time different variables such as the intensity and frequency of seismic events.
The second part of the article will analyze the biographical and scientific events of Torquato Taramelli (1845–1922) and Mario Baratta (1868–1935), key figures in understanding the evolution of the Italian cartographic method and its links with the national government's earthquake prevention and management policies, such as the forms of collaboration established with the government seismic service at the Central Office of Meteorology and Geodynamics (1879). In this context, the publication of the pamphlet Una pratica applicazione degli studi sismici; progetto di assicurazione contro i danni dei terremoti (Baratta, 1899) helped to relaunch the debate, proposing an innovative model that integrated scientific knowledge, individual safety, and land management policies on a national scale.

Author

• Ciro Elio Junior Saltarelli, University of Urbino, Italy