Safety and Reconstruction of Noto after the Sicilian Earthquake of 1693—The Eighteenth-Century Context 1

On Sunday morning, 11 January 1693, one of the strongest European earthquakes in recorded history struck southeastern Sicily. ² Its epicenter was in the island’s limestone Hiblean mountains, overlooking the southeastern coast, where intense shaking ruined forty cities in an instant and killed 54,000 people. In the city of Noto, a historic, rich, inland fortress crowning a rocky outcrop, one citizen remembered: “Then came an earthquake so horrible and ghastly that the soil undulated like the waves of a stormy sea, the mountains danced as if drunk, and the city collapsed in one miserable moment killing more than a thousand people.” ³ The shaking was felt from the island of Malta in the south, where it ruined the city of Mdina, to Calabria in the east, and across the entire island of Sicily to Palermo, where the walls of several palaces collapsed. Southeastern Sicily was devastated.