Sicily lies within the Mediterranean seismic belt – an area particularly vulnerable to earthquakes due to the movement of tectonic plates beneath the Earth’s surface.
The Italian island was devastated by the 1693 Val di Noto earthquake, one of the deadliest in European history. The magnitude 7.4 quake destroyed towns and villages across eastern Sicily and is estimated to have killed 60,000 people.
Today’s earthquakes come as part of an ongoing seismic sequence in the southern Tyrrhenian Sea that has seen at least 60 tremors over the past week, according to seismologist Salvatore Stramondo, director of the Earthquake Department at the National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology.
Sicily is vulnerable to earthquakes(Image: Getty Images)