THE LITTLE BIG HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL NOVO PORTO: HOW TWO VERSIONS OF THE SAME STORY AS WRITTEN IN ROCKS AND IN PARCHMENTS LEAD TO A BETTER UNDERSTANDING OF HUMAN HISTORY

The results of a study by a team of interdisciplinary researchers (Montanari et al., 2016, GSA Bulletin; doi: 10.1130/B31472.1), shed light on a huge landslide involving some five million cubic meters of fallen rocks, which in the early 14th century caused the doom of an important Benedictine enclave and the destruction of a strategic port, which was thriving in the locality of the Conero Riviera today called Portonovo, not far from the commercial port city of Ancona. Geological investigations, including geomorphologic, structural, sedimentologic, and micropaleontologic analyses corroborated by radiocarbon dating, leave little doubt that the landslide occurred in medieval times — contrary to common believe that it occurred in prehistory. However, the scarce and often ambiguous historical documentation available today of the abbey at Santa Maria in Portonovo, which was founded in A.D. 1034, does not give any explicit indication of when this catastrophic event occurred. Actually, the only suggestion of such a catastrophe can be read in a letter that the Benedictine monks wrote in 1319 to the bishop of Ancona begging for the permission to abandon definitively the abbey and adjacent monastery, after three centuries of prosperous activity in Novo Porto because of terrae motus quasi quotidie extra solitum donantur. All the students who wrote about the history of the Ancona area, starting with historian Monsignor Giuliano Saracini in 1675, not only omitted the existence of a port in Portonovo, but also have interpreted the Latin term terrae motus as “earthquake” (terremoto in Italian) rather than a more generic “land movement”, thus an ultra solitum (i.e., extraordinary) landslide. In summary, this study sheds light on a major natural event, which had an important impact on the human history of medieval Italy, and warns of the possibly imminent repetition of such a natural disaster (historia magistra vitae) in what is today the most popular tourist resort in the picturesque Conero Riviera. All in all, this contribution is a good case study of an interdisciplinary scientific investigation of a natural phenomenon as seen from the perspective of the Big History academic movement.