“And now, let’s be quiet and listen.” Thus begins the new book by Paolo Rumiz, who had the brilliant idea of following the fault lines, architectural, that traverse Italy. To go as close as possible to what comes from the depths and shakes, sometimes very brutally, the Italian peninsula with earthquakes and volcanic eruptions.
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Paolo Rumiz, seismograph of the Italian Mediterranean
Thierry Fabre - 22-med September 15, 2025
Italy, Sicily, Calabria, Apennines, Naples, L’Aquila, Norcia, Trieste, Eboli
Paolo Rumiz, Nicolas Bouvier, Silvio Berlusconi, Carlo Levi.
#Italy #Mediterranean #earthquake #volcano #vulnerability #resilience #city #memory
When the faults of the earth reveal the fractures of societies.
Traveling with Rumiz is to read Italy to the rhythm of its tremors.
Inspired traveling writer, a worthy heir or successor to Nicolas Bouvier and his “Usage of the World,” Paolo Rumiz never looks at the world from above. He goes to see how people live and listens to the tremors and folds of the Italian Mediterranean. His new book, “A Voice from the Depths,” is a true enchantment, an invitation to travel in an Italy that we think we know but which he makes us discover in a completely different way. This is undoubtedly due to his ethics as a journalist and writer, to his way of wanting to understand and know, to better share, to make himself available to the words of those who live there and who never give up, often in the face of the worst, to devastating earthquakes.
His journey, from South to North Italy, is at the level of men and women, whom he meets along his way. Armed with a precise seismic map, he follows the paths that lead him to the world of the depths, where the earth cracks, where continental plates collide, an inevitable geophysical reality of Italy, caught between the rise of the African plate and the drift of the Eurasian plate.
No vague theories in his approach, but rather a journey based on precise scientific data, through competent geologists and volcanologists who willingly accompany him on his journey, revealing to him the seismic history of the places, the numerous data accumulated over time, after all these volcanic eruptions and sometimes devastating tremors that have struck Italy since antiquity. He always goes where observation is needed, but his narrative is most often funny and delightful. “Watch out, down there, the devil is cooking his pasta,” laughed the guide upon hearing me cough, as he was heading to the slopes of Etna in Sicily. He tastes this world of the depths and knows how to magnificently share it with us, at the rhythm of his advances, in Sicily, Calabria, or the Apennines.
He does not hesitate to push doors, to see what is brewing behind appearances and especially the official narrative often filled with lies and despicable manipulations and speculations. Through the disastrous example of the earthquake in L’Aquila, which occurred on April 6, 2009, and which caused more than 300 deaths, he traverses the appearances, the dubious staging of the power of Silvio Berlusconi and local authorities, too often inert and especially complicit in risky constructions, with no respect for anti-seismic standards.
What kills are most often the buildings, far more than the tremors that are predictable in these tectonic zones. Conversely, he gives the example of the city of Norcia, “the first anti-seismic city in Italy” which managed to escape the extent of destruction after a tremor of 6.5 on the Richter scale.
But beyond all these tremors, Paolo Rumiz's book is truly a book of the depths. His reading and analysis of Naples, an eruptive city, through its “porosities,” between the high and the low, is of brilliant intelligence.
It is a way to enter the city, to tame it and to make us understand its immense taste for life, in the proximity of death, of destruction, never far away, like a dance on a volcano. “Naples had managed the square of the circle between fertility and death. Perhaps that was the secret. In the simultaneous thought of the exuberance of the living and the familiarity with the dead.”
The writer thus becomes a seismologist of souls. He makes accessible the immense wisdom of those who live close to disaster and who never give up. His pages on the lost places of the Apennines, these lands where, once and perhaps still, “Christ Stopped at Eboli,” according to the title of Carlo Levi's famous book, which inspired a masterful film, are of unforgettable strength and human vividness. There are real characters in this book, made of beautiful encounters, of “beautiful people,” stubborn, resolute in their fight to save life, close to their territory.
And beyond this “seismic reading, if not magmatic, of my dear Italy,” as Paolo Rumiz observes not without humor and with a form of lightness, willingly a proponent of a “superficial by depth,” he touches the heart of things to give understanding, to perceive a form of being in the Mediterranean world. He, who comes from Trieste, tries to scrutinize “the leap of the Mediterranean to the spaces of Central Europe,” and thus to understand what comes to us from this world...
“(...) the lesson of the Mediterranean is obvious. It is not materialist determinism that will save us, but visionary thought. The one that knows how to look far and anticipate changes.” One must read, with ardor and attention, the work of Paolo Rumiz. It is essential!
* Paolo Rumiz, A Voice from the Depths, Arthaud, 2025, 22 euros
Photo of One: Salina Island “With the friendly complicity of Bernard Plossu”
Thierry Fabre
Founder of the Averroès Meetings in Marseille.
Writer, researcher, and exhibition curator. He directed the journal La pensée de midi, the BLEU collection at Actes-Sud, and the programming of the Mucem. He created the Mediterranean program at the Institute of Advanced Studies of Aix-Marseille University.
He is responsible for the editorial oversight of 22-med.