Adopting a resilience perspective, this article analyses the connections between geological tremor and collective trauma in Esther Kinsky’s novel Rombo about the two Friuli earthquakes in 1976 and their aftermath. The article discusses Rombo in the context of nature writing and terrain texts. The analysis reveals how the novel artfully intertwines snippets of memory of seven main characters and how it presents their narrations as an essential dimension of coping, adaptation and transformability of a social community threatened by a hazardous nature, poverty, and emigration. Adding another narrative layer, the novel frames the specific combination of geological conditions and social contexts with recourse to well-known geognostic and geological treatises from the 18th and 19th centuries. The mosaic-like layered narration of the traumatic memories of the disastrous earthquakes presents remembering as an essential activity in the process of resilience-building. This memory, however, is marked by scars, shifts and overlays, also symbolized in the gaps and fractures of the rebuilt cathedral of Venzone. The analysis demonstrates how the social-ecological and psychological resilience concept can be deployed in literary and cultural analysis to understand the vital role of memory and its many forms and manifestations in facing vulnerability and disaster.