The Funnel Over Marsala

On Friday a pair of waterspouts formed off the coast near Marsala and came ashore, striking the town of Petrosino and damaging homes, vehicles and a school. Dozens were injured, according to the Guardian. The BBC's sister coverage and Euronews describe the event as rare, and the Guardian quotes experts calling it almost unprecedented for the island. The footage circulated quickly, as such footage does.

The foreign coverage leans on the word rare, and rightly. But rarity is a fragile comfort. A coastline that has not been built for tornadoes will not be rebuilt for them in a season, and a school roof does not distinguish between a once-in-a-generation event and a habit. The Tyrrhenian and the Strait of Sicily are warm, warming seas; the meteorological literature the international press cites is increasingly comfortable with the idea that the Mediterranean is producing weather it did not used to produce.

There is a second rarity at work here, and it is editorial. Sicily appears in the world's pages most often as a place of arrival — of boats, of rescue ships, of arguments in Brussels about who should receive whom. To see the island described instead as a place struck from the sky is a small shift in the frame, and not an unwelcome one. It restores to the island an ordinary vulnerability that the migration story tends to obscure.

We would not overread a single storm. But we note that the same week's wires carried news of a heist in Tuscany and a papal operation in Rome, and that Sicily entered the world's attention through weather rather than through the sea. The island is more than one story. It is also, increasingly, a place where the weather itself has become a story, and the world is watching it from a distance.