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Italy is a country characterized by high seismic hazard so strong-motion monitoring represents a relevant issue. Several strong-motion networks have been installed in the Italian territory during the last decades, with the aim of recording the ground motion generated by moderate to strong events or to monitor single regions. The collection of the strong-motion recordings of the Italian earthquakes was recently fulfilled and data are distributed through the ITACA database ( http://itaca.mi.ingv.it ). The new data set was used to develop a set of ground motion prediction equations (hereinafter GMPEs) for the Italian territory (Bindi et al., 2009a,c), in order to update the well known GMPEs developed by Sabetta and Pugliese [22]. The recent Mw 6.3 earthquake that occurred in central Italy on April 2009 and the upgrades of the ITACA database gave us the possibility to validate the predictive capability of the newly developed GMPEs and to explore the regional variability inside the Italian territory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]