False earthquake. True superstition.
If you don’t live in Italy or you haven’t read news from this country probably you haven’t heard news about the terrible earthquake which was supposed to happen on May 11th.
However I think that this is a story which is worth to be told, because it teaches much about our culture.
A man called Raffaele Bendandi (died in 1979) stated that he could foresee the occurrence of future earthquake, with a pretty high accuracy about place and time. His theory was based on the motion of planets and Moon. He believed that earthquakes are caused by tidal forces of massive objects in the Solar System. In the end it wasn’t such a bad idea, however it has been proven to be false. Recently someone on the internet stated that Bendandi said that an earthquake was to hit Rome on 11th day of May. False news travel fast, so everyone in Rome knew about the earthquake. One would think that, in 2011, people should know enough about science to understand that it is impossible to foresee earthquakes, not to mention earthquake thirty years from now. Well, it didn’t go that well, in facts a lot of people were scared by the prediction and didn’t even go to work or slept in their cars or somewhere else. I can’t even imagine what will happen on 2012.