Yes, we were right. It wasn’t just our imagination or any excess glass of vino. It was, in fact, an earthquake that hit us that recent night.

Later we read in the papers that “a strong earthquake was felt by the population in Tuscany, in the areas of Lucca, Pistoia, Viareggio and Pisa at 2.36 am on 6 February 2022. The shock, as shown by the data published on the Ingv (National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology), had a magnitude of 3.8 on the Richter scale. The earthquake had its epicentre in the Viareggio area and occurred at a depth of 8 km. The earthquake was felt by worried citizens who wrote dozens of messages on social networks.. Those who slept were awakened with a start by the earthquake. At the moment there doesn’t seem to be any damage to people or things.”

So there we are! Having been brought up in the island kingdom of the UK (although they too are not unknown) I am more used to shocks brought on by strong winds or flooding. In Italy which, in contrast to the ancient largely Cambrian and Ordovician rocks of Britain, is made up of a much more recent geological past with extensive Triassic era mountan folding, earthquakes are a rather more common feature of everyday life. Buildings have ordnances regarding their structural suitability for resisting seismic shocks and earthquake drills are as common in schools and public institutions as fire drills are in UK ones.

Just over one hundred years ago our area’s worst earthquake to-date occured. The Val di Serchio, Garfagnana and Lunigiana earthquake, with its epicentre at Villa Collemandina, was a disastrous seismic event that occurred on 7 September 1920 and struck the region of Tuscany between the provinces of Lucca and Massa Carrara, causing 171 deaths and 650 injuries. It was one of the most destructive seismic events recorded in the Apennine region in the twentieth century and was the strongest ever recorded in Tuscany in historical times, as well as the one with the highest number of victims of the twentieth century, surpassing that which occurred the previous year in Mugello.

If there was a positive side to this event it was that, thanks to good news coverage, the availability of official damage documents and the abundance of recordings from surveillance stations across Europe, it has been regarded as a first-rate case study for improving knowledge of tectonics and ‘macroseismic analysis. Let us hope, however, that just because another seismic disaster is supposed to strike our part of the world one hundred years later we are not ‘due for one’ like the inhabitants of San Francisco.

Now judge for yourselves whether the following photo of our trusty 4 X 4 Panda yesterday shows the result of a seismic shock or a slightly misjudged driving manouvre.

Whatever it was, the same word, ‘shock’, can be used to describe it. Luckily, stalwart local help intervened shortly afterwards and soon our brave little car was happily wending its homeward-bound path.