The Earthquake of Messina F. Marion Crawford; The Editors of New Word City

The Earthquake of Messina

Author: F. Marion Crawford and The Editors of New Word City

Publisher: New Word City

Publication Date: 18 October, 2011

ISBN: 9781612301662

Pages:

Subjects:

Available as: , E-Book - Multiple Formats, 978-1-61230-166-2

Description:

On the morning of December 28, 1908, a massiveearthquake killed more than 100,000 people inMessina, Sicily’s third largest city, and took thelives of thousands more throughout southern Italy.Relief efforts began at once. Newspaper reportersand other writers from all quarters rushed to thescene of the disaster. Among all the accounts, theone that deserves a permanent place in history asthe record of the tragedy is by the noted Americannovelist, F. Marion Crawford, who was staying atthe time in Sorrento, a near-by Italian town.Messina is situated in a volcanic region, close tothe famous peaks of Etna and Vesuvius. Before the1908 tremor, the city’s most tragic previous quakewas in 1783, in which the death toll was 30,000.There had been subsequent shocks in 1894 and 1896;and the city had a grim premonitory warning in1905, when an earthquake killed more than 500people. But the survivors blithely went back totheir lives and their work. They did the sameeven after what Crawford vividly describes as “thegreatest disaster of history.”