L.A.V.A. Literary Atlas of Volcanic and seismic Activity

L.A.V.A. – Literary Atlas of Volcanic and Seismic Activities is a digital and interactive tool, the first of its kind, developed within the framework of the PNRR project P.R.I.S.M.A. – Pondering Risk and Imagining Resilience. A Digital Atlas of Seismic and Volcanic Events in Literature, coordinated since 2024 by Professor Biancamaria Rizzardi (Department of Philology, Literature and Linguistics). The L.A.V.A. Atlas translates into a visual and navigable form a transdisciplinary study focused on the representation of seismic and volcanic phenomena in world literatures from the eighteenth century to the present day. The project investigates how works belonging to different genres and emerging from diverse geographical and cultural contexts have thematized and dramatized risk, disaster, vulnerability, and resilience. L.A.V.A. consists of two complementary mappings: a geographical one, which visualizes on a world map the distribution of geological disasters represented in literature and their ecological and social implications, and an affective one, which groups sensations, emotions, feelings, attitudes, and behaviors of individuals and communities in relation to seismic and volcanic risk and disaster. The analysis of the works—presented as a collection of critical essays available for consultation and download through a dedicated archive—begins with the concrete effects of geophysical events, such as transformations in territorial morphology, impacts on animal and plant ecosystems, and damage to infrastructure, before extending to their social and psychological implications. In line with the reflections of David Etkin and Peter Timmerman, who emphasize the central role of narrative in disaster studies, L.A.V.A. positions itself as a complementary tool to approaches such as hazard assessment, risk analysis, and disaster management. It combines a documentary function with a qualitative (cultural, rhetorical, and linguistic) investigation into risk perception, the memory of events, and the dynamics of community response and resilience. This approach highlights the importance of the speculative dimension of risk and disaster, which often reflects the collective imaginary of specific societies and communities, proving essential for a culturally situated assessment of future risk. Within L.A.V.A., essays, memoirs, newspaper articles, reportage, poems, short stories, and novels are interpreted not merely as ancillary testimonies to scientific analysis, but as genuine cognitive and emotional laboratories in which fear, trauma, identity, catastrophe, loss, and reconstruction find expression. From a methodological perspective, this reading is grounded in a synergistic dialogue between literary theory, affect theory, trauma studies, ecocriticism, postcolonial theory, and critical disaster studies. It offers conceptual tools and rhetorical frameworks capable of fostering a humanistic—yet at the same time post-anthropocentric—reflection on risk and disaster. In literature, indeed, disaster is never conceived as a mere “event,” but rather as an anthropological test and a process shaped by environmental, cultural, socioeconomic, and geopolitical factors.