The city of L’Aquila (central Italy) and its surrounding villages have been struck several times throughout history by strong earthquakes, most recently by the $$M_w$$ M w 6.1 event of April 6, 2009. Previously, on February 2, 1703, L’Aquila was partially destroyed by a $$M_w$$ M w 6.7 earthquake, which has remained in the city’s collective memory as the Grande Terremoto (“Big Earthquake”). In this paper, we present a physics-...

On April 6, 2009, a strong earthquake (6.1 Mw) struck the city of L’Aquila, which was severely damaged as well as many neighboring towns. After this event, a digital model of the region affected by the earthquake was built and a large amount of data was collected and made available. This allowed us to obtain a very detailed dataset that accurately describes a typical historic city in central Italy. Building on this work, we pr...