Despite Italy has one of the most complete and back‐in‐time extended seismic catalogue worldwide, our knowledge concerning the periodicity of the strongest earthquakes is still poor and debated. Whereas we are aware that almost all the highest magnitude classes (6 ≤ M ≤ 7) in the Italian peninsula are sourced by the normal fault systems paralleling the Apennines divide, the relatively low slip rates of these faults imply that the average recurrence time is often longer than the historical completeness period. This biases probabilistic seismic hazard assessment based only on historical catalogues. Since in the past 30 years the Italian earthquake geologists produced many valuable palaeoseismological data in hundreds of trenches opened across active faults, here I have tried to collect and match their results in order to evaluate the recurrence times of the faults having the most robust chronological constraints. Resulting average recurrence spans from few centuries to 3,000 years during the Holocene, whereas it is shorter in the historical period.

中文翻译：

---

中南部亚平宁断裂（意大利）的复发时间：古地震学提示

尽管意大利拥有全球范围内最完整，最及时的扩展地震目录，但我们对最强烈地震的周期性的了解仍然很少，并且存在争议。尽管我们知道意大利半岛上几乎所有的最高震级类别（6≤M≤7）都来自与亚平宁山脉平行的正常断层系统，但是这些断层的相对滑移率较低，这意味着平均重现时间通常是比历史完整期更长的时间。这使仅基于历史目录的概率地震危险性评估存在偏差。自从过去30年以来，意大利地震地质学家在横跨活动断层的数百条沟槽中产生了许多有价值的古地震学数据，在这里，我试图收集并匹配它们的结果，以评估具有最可靠的时间约束的故障的重复发生时间。在全新世期间，平均复发时间从几个世纪到3,000年不等，而在历史时期则较短。