At 04:03 local time on 20 May 2012, a magnitude 6.0 earthquake ruptured a buried thrust fault beneath the Po Plain in Emilia-Romagna, near Massa Finalese, killing seven people. Nine days later, on 29 May at 09:00 local time, a second shock, magnitude 5.8, struck around 12 km to the west near Medolla, this time in daylight and working hours: twenty more people died, several of them factory and warehouse workers crushed inside buildings that had survived the first quake. In total 27 people died, around 400 were injured and up to 45,000 were displaced at the peak. Liquefaction sent sand and water erupting from the ground around San Carlo and Sant'Agostino, and hundreds of thousands of wheels of Parmigiano-Reggiano and Grana Padano cheese, worth roughly €200m, crashed from collapsed ageing racks.
This was not, by raw size, a large earthquake: more than 6,200 catalogued events have been bigger. What made it Italy's costliest insured earthquake was what it hit: a dense industrial and agri-food district built on soft, liquefiable ground, where long precast factory roofs held on by friction alone slid off their columns. Unusually for Italy, the businesses there carried commercial property and business-interruption cover, so insured losses reached roughly €1.24bn against an economic loss of €12-16bn, the largest insured earthquake loss in the Italian market's history, even though close to 90% of the damage was still uninsured. That is the inverse of Amatrice-Norcia (EP63) and L'Aquila, where insurance barely featured; Emilia is instead one of the reference events behind Italy's 2024 mandatory catastrophe-insurance law for businesses.