Perched high at the top of the narrow lane, the mailbox was smeared with dry dirt. In the kitchen of the small house wedged between the mountain and neighboring buildings, signs of daily life were suspended in time: children’s water bottles still half full, pasta rotting in an open Tupperware container. In the bathroom, a bathrobe hung on the wall, the children’s potty lay on its side. And everywhere – on the furniture, across the mattress, and streaming down the windows – traces of mud served as a reminder of the violent weather that swept through here on February 2.

That day, in the hills above Saponara in northeastern Sicily, the sky unleashed 140 millimeters of rain in just four hours. Water rushed down the streets, turning them into torrents of mud, pouring through doorways. “It happened all at once, we didn’t see it coming. So we grabbed the two youngest kids and went to the house next door,” recalled Nino Aksoy, a 35-year-old German who had moved here with his partner and their five children to work in a rotisserie. “But we survived, we didn’t lose anyone. That’s what really matters, isn’t it?” His family, like 11 others, had to be relocated.

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