Last night’s rain was quite an experience. It rained most of the day, and quite hard much of the time, but it started coming down in buckets around midnight. I was already in bed when I realized I had to close the remaining few shutters. I giggled as I ran naked around the dark house. The windows gave me little trouble, as the wind was quite mild, but I still got wet each time I leaned out to unlatch a shutter wing. The door leading to the kitchen terrace was the greatest challenge: to close the shutters, I had to step out into the rain. Twice, once for each wing. I was drenched in seconds. Before returning to bed, I had to go to the bathroom and dry myself with a towel. Lying again in bed, I kept giggling. The muffled sounds of the downpour were thrilling. But only this morning, when I opened my bedroom window, I realized how much water had come down last night: there were huge, irregular puddles in the fields along the river, which had burst its banks in many places. Swollen and muddy, it looked threatening for the first time in my experience. And for the first time I wondered about its quaint name: Mirna or Quieto in Italian means something like “the peaceful and serene one.” Could this be a joke of some kind?