The panic has been fanned by Facebook, Twitter and text messages around a prediction by Raffaele Bendani, a seismologist who forecast in 1915 that a “big one” would hit Rome on Wednesday.

He is also said to have predicted other earthquakes which hit Italy during the last hundred years before his death in 1979…

Bendandi believed movement of plates and therefore earthquakes were the result of the combined movements of the planets, the moon and the sun and perfectly predictable.

In 1923 he predicted a quake would hit central Italy on January 2 the following year – he was wrong by two days.