Worried Romans flee city 'just in case'

Raffaele Bendandi. Photo / Supplied

If Rome's usually bustling streets were less busy than usual today it was because hundreds of thousands of locals decided to vacate the Eternal City for 24 hours - on the off-chance there might be a devastating earthquake.

Predictions of a disaster in the capital, attributed to a long dead pseudo-scientist, Raffaele Bendandi, have been dismissed and even ridiculed by public safety officials for weeks. But this hasn't stopped many Romans planning a day off so they can head for the country just to be on the safe side.

According to La Repubblica, 20 per cent fewer people than usual were expected to be present in Rome's schools and offices. This was confirmed by figures quoted elsewhere in the media suggesting the number of days off requested by workers was up by a fifth compared with the same date last year.

Rumours about Benandi's dire predictions have been proliferating on social networking sites for week or even months. At the start of April the civil protection agency began putting out notices telling people not to panic after concern about the charlatan's predictions started to swell.

The national television network RAI has run programmes aimed at preventing fear of a tremor. The city's La Sapienza University even organised an earthquake information open day, in combination with the National Institute of Vulcanology, to dispel the fears.

But Romans' concerns appeared to be down to Chinese whispers, much less cod-science. Paola Lagorio, the president of an association dedicated to Bendandi, which preserves all his manuscripts, claimed there was no clear reference to any major earthquake in Rome in 2011, despite claims to the contrary circulating in internet chat rooms.

Bendandi, who died in 1979 aged 86, did make many prophesies, however, and believed earthquakes could be predicted accurately on the basis of the interaction between the planets, the moon and the sun.

In 1923, he forecast a quake would hit the central Adriatic region of the Marches on January 2 the following year. He was out by two days, and, given the numbers of portentous warnings he produced, it might be argued that sooner or later he was bound to strike lucky.

Nonetheless, Italy's main newspaper Corriere della Sera called him: "the man who forecasts earthquakes".

27 he was awarded the Italian version of a knighthood by the Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini.

Later in life, as he started to unnerve too many people, Mussolini forbade him publishing further forecasts on earthquakes, on threat of exile.

- INDEPENDENT