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frightened by the fury of the lake, and the noise of the water was heard as far as eighteen
miles. The fishermen fell from their boats, and many were drowned, and the world seemed
to sink]
The diaries of the Bianchi family (1629-1743) give a cumulative description cov-
ering January to March, including earthquakes, also felt in the city of Brescia to
which the diaries mostly refer, and the above mentioned lanslide, without supplying
a precise date.
“In quest'anno in Gennaro, Febraro e Marzo si sentono sette o otto terremoti di piu si vede
uno eclissi del sole e nell'istesso tempo un terremoto per il crollo del quale cadono in Citt a
e per il territorio camini, volte e fabriche con morte anche di qualcheduno. Un pezzo di
monte cade nel lago d'Iseo e l'onda si porta verso la riva opposta cioe verso sera che rese
a quelle terre molto terrore se bene cessa in tempo di due ore tal commotione”
[On January, February and March of this year seven or eight earthquakes are felt, and further
there is a solar eclipse and at the same time an earthquake the shaking of which makes
chimneys vaults and buildings collapse in this City and the surroundings and the death of
some people. A portion of a mountain falls in Lake Iseo and the wave goes to the opposite
coast that is to the west and this caused a great fear in those places though the commotion
ends in two hours].
Boschi et al. (1995; 2000), using the same sources, associate all the effects referred
to March 1661 to a single event with date 12 March 1661. This includes the damage
at Brescia, the presumed shaking in Bergamo, the light shaking in Crema and the
landslide near Castro. The resulting intensities are I 7-8 MCS at Montecchio (which
they locate north of Lake Iseo), I 7 MCS at Albino, I 6 MCS at Brescia, I 5-6 MCS
at Bergamo, I 3 MCS at Crema.
In our opinion this is a sequence of moderate events, rather difficult to be sorted
out. The overall picture looks dominated by the damage to single buildings in Albino
and Montecchio - at which we do not assess I MCS following the standards adopted
for the compilation of DBMI04 (Stucchi et al., 2007) - and by the landslide; from
this picture there is no clear evidence supporting a widely damaging event. Our
resulting intensity distributions are:
17 or 18 January 1661
Bergamo
5 MCS
Crema
5
Milano
F
11 March 1661
Albino
D
Montecchio
D
Bergamo
5 (possibly)
Milano
F
3.3.2 Around Brescia: 1064-1065
Postpischl (1985a) reported two earthquakes dated 11 April 1064 in the Brescia
area; the first one without time, Io 8 MCS, Mm 5.2 and epicentral location at
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