According to a contemporary account of the earthquake by Vincentius Bonajutus , published in the '' Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society '' , " It was in this country impossible to keep upon our legs , or in one place on the dancing Earth ; nay , those that lay along on the ground , were tossed from side to side , as if on a rolling billow . " Sicily lies on part of the complex convergent boundary where the African Plate is subducting beneath the Eurasian Plate . This subduction zone is responsible for the formation of the stratovolcano Mount Etna and considerable seismic activity . Most damaging earthquakes however , occur on the Siculo-Calabrian rift zone . This zone of extensional faulting runs for about , forming three main segments through Calabria , along the east coast of Sicily and immediately offshore , and finally forming the southeastern margin of the Hyblaean Plateau . Faults in the Calabrian segment were responsible for the 1783 Calabrian earthquakes sequence
1783 Calabrian earthquakes
1783 Calabrian earthquakes
1693 Sicily earthquake