The recent devastating earthquakes and associated tsunamis in Japan, Indonesia, and Haiti, which killed more than half a million people, highlighted how mankind is still far away from a satisfactory level of seismic risk mitigation. Among the regions around the Mediterranean Sea for which earthquakes represent a major threat to their social and economic development, the area around the Marmara Sea, one of the most densely populated parts of Europe, is subjected to a high level of seismic hazard. For this region the MARSITE project is proposed with the aim of assessing the state of the art of seismic risk evaluation and management at European level. This will be the starting point to move a step forward towards new concepts of risk mitigation and management by long-term monitoring activities carried out both on land and at sea. The MARSITE project aims to coordinate research groups with different scientific skills (from seismology to engineering to gas geochemistry) in a comprehensive monitoring activity developed both in the Marmara Sea and in the surrounding urban and country areas. The project plans to coordinate initiatives to collect multidisciplinary data, to be shared, interpreted and merged in consistent theoretical and practical models suitable for the implementation of good practices to move the necessary information to the end users.