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ernments, which - as a general rule - are richer, better preserved, easier to find and
more accessible to researchers than most municipal archives. The records produced
by Papal officials that had dealt with earthquake effects in the Papal States were
easily retrieved (ASRM [Archivio di Stato, Rome] 1789-1795) but their Tuscan
homologues - the damage surveys made in Sansepolcro and its district - could not
be located in the Archivio di Stato of Florence, owing to damage suffered by the rel-
evant holdings in the Great Flood of 1966 (a loss reflected by the paucity of Tuscan
data mentioned in 1). It was also impossible to retrieve a most important document
mentioned in Roman records, a damage survey of the whole Governatorate of Citta
di Castello, which had been made during the 1789-1790 winter and, after having
been originally stored in Rome, had been later on sent to Citta di Castello, in whose
municipal archives it should have been preserved. Unfortunately, when the (Castelli
et al. 1996 study was carried out, the historical section of the archives was still unin-
ventoried, and therefore unavailable to researchers. It took six or seven years more
before an inventory was started and reached an advanced enough stage to identify
one of the three ledgers originally composing the survey (ASCC [Archivio storico
comunale, Citta di Castello] 1790). Though incomplete, this document gives infor-
mation on about 85% of the buildings of Citta di Castello itself (Castelli 2002) and
on several outlying hamlets. More or less at the same time, and by a mere chance,
a list of names and addresses of the householders who had been subsidized by the
State on account of damage suffered during the 1789 earthquake was discovered in
the municipal archives of Sansepolcro (ASCS [Archivio storico comunale, Sanse-
polcro] 1789-1791). Though this kind of information cannot make up for the loss of
the actual damage surveys, it gives at least the location of single damaged buildings
and can therefore be used for a preliminary identification of affected localities. The
input of these data allows to add another forty-five previously unknown affected
sites to the macroseismic database of the 1789 earthquake (Fig. 4, Table 3).
5 Why to Tell This Story?
How does this story end and why to tell it at all? The referees who read its first
draft asked to know whether the increase in MIDP improves the parameters of the
1789 earthquake. A fair question, which the author must leave unanswered: pending
the revision of the current Italian earthquake catalogue, the “new” 1789 earthquake
database was turned in to the people in charge and the judgment is now up to them.
However, it can at least be pointed out that - for what concerns the town of Citta
di Castello itself - the evidence of a contemporary damage survey (ASCC [Archivio
storico comunale, Citta di Castello] 1790) allows to draw a much more reliable im-
age of urban damage than previously available and to refute the catastrophic sce-
nario depicted by (Giovanetti 1992), according to which the 1789 earthquake “rase
al suolo una gran parte degli edifici e [
] risparmio solo quelli di piu recente
costruzione” [razed to the ground a great many buildings, leaving untouched only
...
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