Memories of the past contribute to prevention: photography as a direct means for public understanding of science Caterina Piccione Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia, Rome, Italy ANNALS OF GEOPHYSICS, 55, 3, 2012; doi: 10.4401/ag-5529 ABSTRACT There are thousands of ways to achieve a sustainable future for our Planet. Some of these follow high-value scientific research activities, while others simply aim to increase people’s awareness of what can and should be done to improve our, and our children’s, quality of life. The easiest way to develop this specific kind of ‘spread of culture’ consists of bringing back to life what was preserved of the history of a population and of a territory, by representing it in a renewed form, and by making it ‘food for thought’. The Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia (INGV) followed this approach and decided to publish two volumes where the objective was to make people more aware of the geological and volcanic risks in some specific areas of Italy. The immediacy of the photography is used to tell the stories of volcanoes and earthquakes, to represent past events that have become ‘memories’. and to use these as a basis to build a better future. Terremoto Calabro Messinese, 1908/2008 and Terre di Fuoco are the two photographic books that have been published by INGV in cooperation with Alinari, the oldest firm in the world in the field of photography and image communication. The photographs selected to be included in the two books had a double significance: on the one side, they had to convey to the reader the immediacy of the emotions that other people had felt and lived; and on the other side, they had to make people understand the importance of prevention. The fascination of history, the importance of memories of the past, and the extraordinary strength of images help the reader build a link between the past, the present and the future, where the lessons learnt from past centuries and from the study of the Earth and its energy help us to understand which steps should be taken to achieve a ‘sustainable’ future. 1. Introduction Volcanic eruptions and earthquakes have always ac- companied man over the centuries. As manifestations, sometimes extreme, of the internal dynamics of our Planet, they have been the subject of stories and docu- ments of extraordinary quality. Indeed, the numerous tes- timonies, as well as their historical and literary value, represent an immense heritage for scientific research, and it is also thanks to these texts that we can reconstruct the history of the Earth, and in particular, the history of its volcanoes and earthquakes. Man has always tried to describe what happens dur- ing an earthquake and to document the power of volcanic eruptions, their effects, the tragedies of the victims and survivors, the difficulties of reconstruction, and all of the steps of these natural events, almost wanting to leave a constructive witness of what they have observed. While this applies to our entire Planet, in Italy, the immense archives of writings and testimonies of the past have allowed scholars to understand the series of volcanic eruptions and earthquakes over the centuries. This is in- formation that is of vital importance for Italy, whose ter- ritory is characterized by areas of high seismic risk, and by the presence of numerous active volcanoes. Due to this great availability of material, the work of researchers, however, has had to cope with the need to achieve scien- tific reconstruction of events, while in the tales of past memories, technical data and timely observations have very often become mixed with partial, inaccurate, and sometimes fanciful, reports. Since antiquity, there have been reconstructions of extreme natural events that have generated many doubts, as well as other writings representing, in some ways, the basics of seismology and volcanology. However, it was with the advent of communication by images that the tales of disasters took on a central and objective role for the world of scientific research. Photographs have the abil- ity not to modify what they represent: as it was not possi- ble to manipulate photographs, those who saw them could draw a full, objective interpretation, which provided conclusive evidence of understanding about what they represented. Vintage photographs become extraordinarily sharp tools in the hands of researchers, as precious testimonies of past events, where their analysis is fundamental to the Article history Received December 21, 2011; accepted January 26, 2012. Subject classification: Memories, Prevention, Historical images. 427