“The Tropic of Mud is the new latitude we suddenly found ourselves living in, with the water level marked on the walls of the houses, the flood line: above, the world as it was, clean; below, the new world, muddied, mixed with the wreckage of our past.”

These are times of unprecedented floods—we all know it. Since May 2023, Romagna, in central Italy, has been devastated by three colossal floods. Cristiano Cavina, a beloved writer and a true voice of this land, recounts what he experienced with sharp wit and keen observation: “I wrote these pages while my house was still half-flooded, with life jackets tied to the roof and people around me who had lost everything. One of my neighbors even lost his life.” Living in Faenza, Cristiano narrowly escaped thanks to a railroad crossing, which unexpectedly blocked the water’s advance. Meanwhile, in his childhood home in the Apennines, entire mountains crumbled, leaving only the road intact. For a whole day, he didn’t know if his mother was alive or dead. She was alive. And she had saved a bunch of refugee chickens. These are the stories of Tropic of Mud. But this book, brimming with humanity, is also a love letter to the land and its people—people who never stay silent, who, even with broken hearts, still find the strength to sing, if only to laugh in the face of disaster.