Between February and March 1783, when this part of what is now Italy was in the Kingdom of Naples, Calabria was hit by no fewer than five major earthquakes in a series that seismologists now believe to have been related by a process called ‘stress redistribution’. The first, on the 5th of February, had a magnitude of 7.0 and shook most of the southern end of the Peninsula and the island of Sicily. There was another the following day, slightly smaller, and another the day after that, again slightly smaller. Then there was a relatively little one (5.9) on the 1st of March, and then another 7.0 on the 28th. There were tsunamis, landslides and perhaps 50,000 casualties.