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© UnknownMr Bendandi became hugely famous in Italy for the accuracy of his predictions
On January 4 1924, after an earthquake struck the Italian province of Le Marche, Raffaele Bendandi hit the headlines.

Mr Bendandi, a self-taught scientist, had foreseen the quake, registering a statement with a notary on November 1923 that it would strike on January 2.

Although he was two days off, the Corriere della Sera newspaper splashed him on its front page, naming him: "The man who predicts earthquakes".

Mr Bendandi, who died in 1979, never provided any scientific proof for his theory that the movements of the moon and sun, as well as other planets in the solar system, exert a gravitational influence on the movements of the earth's crust.

However, he became hugely famous in Italy for the accuracy of his predictions. He predicted the earthquake of January 13, 1915 which killed 30,000 people in Avezzano.

He also forecast the quake of May 6, 1976 in Friuli which killed 1,000 and left another 45,000 homeless.

Benito Mussolini, the Italian dictator, took Mr Bendandi seriously enough that he made him a Knight of the Order of the Crown of Italy, but also banned him from making any public predictions, on pain of exile.

Born in 1893 in the central Italian city of Faenza to a poor family, Mr Bendandi was sent after elementary school to pursue a course in technical design and became a watchmaker's apprentice. However, he nursed a passion for astronomy and geophysics and built his own telescope and seismographs.

Following the Messina earthquake in December 1908 he began to study earthquakes. After he returned from serving as a mechanic in the First World War, he joined the Italian Seismology Society in 1920 and began to work on his own theories, which he called "seismogenics". In the course of his studies, he lowered himself into a deep cave in the Apennine mountains to take readings.

In 1959, he claimed to have discovered a new planet in the solar system between Mercury and the Sun which he named Faenza, after his home town.

Among the writings he left after his death were some predictions for the future. Again, these were considered dangerous enough that someone attempted to burn them, but fragments remain intact and contain two dates: 2011 and 2012.

However, the two dates were unaccompanied by any geographical locations for the predicted earthquakes.