When the Mountains Dance

Foreign correspondent Christine Toomey spent years renovating her glorious, long-abandoned hill-top home in Le Marche, Italy, as a haven of rest from covering crises around the world. But in 2016, the peace and beauty of this beloved landscape were thrown into chaos when a series of powerful earthquakes struck the heart of the Apennines.

Wracked with grief for a place still reverberating with seismic aftershocks, Christine decided that one way of preserving the community was to tell its history.

Fuelled by the artefacts uncovered in her attic—including oil paintings and lithographs, a map, thick with dust but showing details of the earthquake that obliterated Messina in 1908, and century-old letters belonging to the enigmatic priest who had occupied her house a century earlier—Christine set out on a journey to tell the story of the earthquakes that devastated the region.

The result is a heartfelt, insightful and life-affirming story about the places that make us, and the life-changing thunderbolts that can come at all of us, at any time, from any quarter.

When the Mountains Dance is not just a narrative about natural disasters but a tribute to resilience and the enduring spirit of a community woven into the fabric of Italy’s cultural and historical landscape.