Learning from the past to face the future: landslides in the Piave Valley (Eastern Alps, Italy)

Landslides are a critical process in landscape evolution and may pose a serious threat to people and infrastructure. In the last decades, a growing interest in such phenomena has developed in the Alps, where narrow valleys are increasingly inhabited, and landslides have caused several casualties. Understanding the driving factors, triggers, evolution, and impact of past and future failures is of the utmost importance when dealing with land use and risk reduction. In this paper, four distinct case studies are presented, showing how different approaches can interact and produce a comprehensive understanding of a landslide event. All examples lie in the middle sector of the Piave Valley (NE Italy) and deal with failures that occurred in the distant past (i.e., the historic Masiere di Vedana rock avalanche), in the near past (i.e., the 1963 Vajont event), in the present (i.e., the 60-years -lasting Tessina landslide) and in the future (i.e., possible Mt. Peron instabilities). The final goal of the paper is to show how the understanding of past landslides is fundamental to obtain reliable predictions on future failures, and how modelling designed to predict the evolution of potential detachments can be applied to understand the dynamics of ancient events.