In this paper, the author investigates three ways of narrating natural disasters and catastrophic events: allegorical, anecdotal, and historical, showing that the historical narrative is given prominence at the beginning of the seventeenth century, mainly in Italy. The reason is twofold: first, political/polemical explanations emerge alongside religious ones; second, the expression of a point of view contributes to this increased recourse to the narrative. The article also deals with the difference between factual and fictional narratives, exploring the issue in the context of the historical experience constructed by the narrative. Fiction allows the disaster to be experienced in a paradoxical relation to time, through the point of view of an “impossible witness”.