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When the Mountains Dance: Love, loss and hope in the heart of Italy
'In the wake of the strongest earthquake in Italy for nearly forty years and the many aftershocks that followed, Italians began speaking of the earth beneath our feet as la terra ballerina, the dancing earth. The dance they spoke of was unrelenting.'
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.
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.
261 pages, Kindle Edition
Published March 30, 2023
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
September 7, 2023
This is a beautifully written book about life in a medieval town in the Marche region of Italy, and the impact of two major earthquakes in 2016. I now live permanently in the same town and was present for the first earthquake in 2016, when using my house as a holiday home. Toomey captures the atmosphere and the fear and shock experienced by the inhabitants at the time, together with the stress and frustrations of the slow moving pace of reconstruction. A lovely story and a very enjoyable read, the author is not know to me, but I would love to see the paintings she found in her house.
August 7, 2023
What do we truly leave behind when we die? Do our lives ‘pass into the stones’ of the homes we dwell in? If they do, should the fragments of those lives, if discovered by those who come after us, be revealed? These are some of the questions perceptively examined in Christine Toomey’s ‘When the Mountains Dance’.
A heart-searching autobiography of an award-winning foreign correspondent, a history book, a travel guide, a ghost story, a first-hand testimony to man’s resilience in the face of natural disasters, a psychological handbook….this book is all these things.
It begins with a journalist’s search for a ‘haven of rest’ after two decades covering violence and war – ‘stories of struggle and sorrow’ - for the Sunday Times leading her to buy a holiday home in the historic town of Amandola nestled in the Sibellini mountains of Italy.
Despite a busy life in London and foreign cities, she restores the house to its old magnificence. She removes an old map of the destruction caused by an earthquake over a century earlier she discovers in its attic to London where it is left gathering dust in the corner of her study.
Only in August 2016 when her home is struck by central Italy’s most powerful earthquake in four decades does she look at it again. Intrigued to know more about why the priest, who once lived in her home left it there, she begins to piece together his life story, travelling to seminaries and the small towns of Le Marche region he served.
He becomes her ‘silent companion’ as she reflects also on her ‘inner life’ – how restlessness became instilled in her during a childhood of living with the ‘infinite horizon’ of the sea in Wales, silently witnessing as a child her mother’s grief, the sudden loss of both parents years later, her struggle as a single mother and a recent diagnosis of her own ‘fault line’…a heart murmur.
Her journey takes her to Sicily, the map opening doors to senior seismologists and historians keen to see it. Along the way she visits the soulless windswept, open spaces of new towns ‘dominated by concrete and cement’ created after earthquakes in the sixties when it was thought better to dynamite and bulldoze than rebuild.
But where man has not added to nature’s destruction, she finds resilience to rebuild communities. The earthquake takes but also gives back: a niche containing a sixteenth-century Madonna revealed when a wardrobe in a church was toppled, an even rarer fifteenth-century statue discovered in an unknown secret compartment of an old oak cupboard.
In essence the book is about how the past may have shaped our lives in places we feel we belong to more than we know and how we deal with love and loss in the face of uncertainty.
ends
A heart-searching autobiography of an award-winning foreign correspondent, a history book, a travel guide, a ghost story, a first-hand testimony to man’s resilience in the face of natural disasters, a psychological handbook….this book is all these things.
It begins with a journalist’s search for a ‘haven of rest’ after two decades covering violence and war – ‘stories of struggle and sorrow’ - for the Sunday Times leading her to buy a holiday home in the historic town of Amandola nestled in the Sibellini mountains of Italy.
Despite a busy life in London and foreign cities, she restores the house to its old magnificence. She removes an old map of the destruction caused by an earthquake over a century earlier she discovers in its attic to London where it is left gathering dust in the corner of her study.
Only in August 2016 when her home is struck by central Italy’s most powerful earthquake in four decades does she look at it again. Intrigued to know more about why the priest, who once lived in her home left it there, she begins to piece together his life story, travelling to seminaries and the small towns of Le Marche region he served.
He becomes her ‘silent companion’ as she reflects also on her ‘inner life’ – how restlessness became instilled in her during a childhood of living with the ‘infinite horizon’ of the sea in Wales, silently witnessing as a child her mother’s grief, the sudden loss of both parents years later, her struggle as a single mother and a recent diagnosis of her own ‘fault line’…a heart murmur.
Her journey takes her to Sicily, the map opening doors to senior seismologists and historians keen to see it. Along the way she visits the soulless windswept, open spaces of new towns ‘dominated by concrete and cement’ created after earthquakes in the sixties when it was thought better to dynamite and bulldoze than rebuild.
But where man has not added to nature’s destruction, she finds resilience to rebuild communities. The earthquake takes but also gives back: a niche containing a sixteenth-century Madonna revealed when a wardrobe in a church was toppled, an even rarer fifteenth-century statue discovered in an unknown secret compartment of an old oak cupboard.
In essence the book is about how the past may have shaped our lives in places we feel we belong to more than we know and how we deal with love and loss in the face of uncertainty.
ends
January 22, 2026
This is a special book and it really resonated with me. I too have a place in Italy where we go to restore our belief in life and to reconnect.
Like the author, we too feel we are only custodians of the home we have rescued from crumbling into nothing and we feel responsible about preservation of its history for the future. We are on the border of Le Marche in the easternmost tip of Tuscany. My mother-in-law was a marchegiana and we married in a tiny hamlet near Urbino. We have stayed in the area near Amandola and our children were affected by the same earthquake which features in Toomey’s book. So, I felt a deep connection to "When the Mountains Dance". However, this beautiful book is for everyone, not purely Italophiles.
Toomey has a very reflective style, which I love. A busy journalist who has worked in stressful, harrowing situations, she found her home in Amandola when she most needed it:
“…for our lives are laid down like sediment. Each layer accruing and compressing the one below until hairline fractures, fault lines form. My own, I realised, were buried deep, and over time I felt them begin to give ,,,”
And the home she restores becomes: “my sanctuary from a troubled world…”
After the earthquake which devastates her beloved town, when she is permitted by the authorities to return, she finds paintings and documents in her house. She feels compelled to research more about the former owner, Don Federico, a priest. In so doing, we are treated to interesting snippets of history: the brutal regime of Mussolini’s fascist dominance, the very active resistance movement around the Gustav Line during WW2, the growth of the Mafia during the 1950s – when rebuilding the country was like a "paradise of profit for criminal networks…” - some of whose construction was “of dangerously poor standard”. Not long after, comes the period of mass emigration from Le Marche (a staggering 700,000) and in particularly from Amandola, to the USA. These sections and others regarding fables about the area are fascinating and informative.
Toomey feels a responsibility to unearth more and more about her home's previous owners. In the end, she concludes that a lot of it might be guesswork, but the detective work we follow is wonderful: “ as a journalist you sometimes travel more in hope than expectation…”
I greatly admire the respectful, responsible attitude she has to delving into the past. Yes, it helps her too but she admits to having slight pangs of guilt for reading the correspondence she discovers, as if looking for absolution and forgiveness, even though she wasn’t raised a RC. However, through investigating Don Federico’s history, it was “a way of finding a light to follow through the darkness, A way of understanding how to accept impermanence and uncertainty and how to stay balanced when the earth beneath us begins to dance, wherever and in whatever way that might be.”
Wonderful! I do recommend this to anybody who has a home in beautiful, complicated Italy but it can be enjoyed by anybody. Five stars, without a doubt.
Like the author, we too feel we are only custodians of the home we have rescued from crumbling into nothing and we feel responsible about preservation of its history for the future. We are on the border of Le Marche in the easternmost tip of Tuscany. My mother-in-law was a marchegiana and we married in a tiny hamlet near Urbino. We have stayed in the area near Amandola and our children were affected by the same earthquake which features in Toomey’s book. So, I felt a deep connection to "When the Mountains Dance". However, this beautiful book is for everyone, not purely Italophiles.
Toomey has a very reflective style, which I love. A busy journalist who has worked in stressful, harrowing situations, she found her home in Amandola when she most needed it:
“…for our lives are laid down like sediment. Each layer accruing and compressing the one below until hairline fractures, fault lines form. My own, I realised, were buried deep, and over time I felt them begin to give ,,,”
And the home she restores becomes: “my sanctuary from a troubled world…”
After the earthquake which devastates her beloved town, when she is permitted by the authorities to return, she finds paintings and documents in her house. She feels compelled to research more about the former owner, Don Federico, a priest. In so doing, we are treated to interesting snippets of history: the brutal regime of Mussolini’s fascist dominance, the very active resistance movement around the Gustav Line during WW2, the growth of the Mafia during the 1950s – when rebuilding the country was like a "paradise of profit for criminal networks…” - some of whose construction was “of dangerously poor standard”. Not long after, comes the period of mass emigration from Le Marche (a staggering 700,000) and in particularly from Amandola, to the USA. These sections and others regarding fables about the area are fascinating and informative.
Toomey feels a responsibility to unearth more and more about her home's previous owners. In the end, she concludes that a lot of it might be guesswork, but the detective work we follow is wonderful: “ as a journalist you sometimes travel more in hope than expectation…”
I greatly admire the respectful, responsible attitude she has to delving into the past. Yes, it helps her too but she admits to having slight pangs of guilt for reading the correspondence she discovers, as if looking for absolution and forgiveness, even though she wasn’t raised a RC. However, through investigating Don Federico’s history, it was “a way of finding a light to follow through the darkness, A way of understanding how to accept impermanence and uncertainty and how to stay balanced when the earth beneath us begins to dance, wherever and in whatever way that might be.”
Wonderful! I do recommend this to anybody who has a home in beautiful, complicated Italy but it can be enjoyed by anybody. Five stars, without a doubt.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews