L'Italo-Americano

L'Italo-Americano THURSDAY, JULY 23, 2026 www.italoamericano.org 4 I taly is living through one of the hottest s u m m e r s i n i t s record books. Since late June, a dome of hot African air has held much of the country above 100°F, with red alerts posted in as many as two dozen cities at once, and this is no freak of a single bad year: for most of the past decade, Italian sum- mers have run hotter, longer, and harsher, until the season foreigners still picture as golden and gentle turned into s o m e t h i n g c o n s i d e r a b l y fiercer. But the heat now is not only breaking records, it is actually changing how Ital- ians live through their sum- mer, and how the rest of the world chooses to come and enjoy il Belpaese. By the end of June, the thermometer in Bologna had already touched 104°F, and across much of the country, it stayed near there for weeks. The African anticyclone that settled over Italy pushed daytime highs some fifteen to eighteen degrees above the seasonal norm; Rome reached 104°F again in the middle of July, and the deep South climbed past 115°F in the parched interiors of Sici- ly and Sardinia. For days on end, the national weather map was stamped with bolli- ni rossi, the red dots that mark the health ministry's highest level of alert. Tus- cany watched wildfires break out in its tinder-dry hills. And in Rome, the darkness brought little relief, the tem- p e r a t u r e r e f u s i n g t o f a l l below about 68°F through a long run of the sweltering "tropical nights" that leave neither a city nor its sleepers any chance to cool down. What really changed, in truth, is not the heat itself but, rather, its regulari- ty, because extreme sum- mers have become ordinary: the peaks climb a little high- er each year, the heat arrives a little earlier and lingers a little later, until what a gen- e r a t i o n a g o w o u l d h a v e counted as a freak August has settled into the shape of the whole season. Italians have felt the shift the way one notices a friend growing older, all at once rather than day by day, and, being Ital- ians, they have set about adjusting to it in ways both very old and quite new. Much of such adjustment is a sort of homecoming to o l d e r k n o w l e d g e . L o n g b e f o r e a i r c o n d i t i o n i n g , which reached Italy late and still cools far fewer homes here than in any American suburb, the real defenses against the summer were architecture and habit: shutter the persiane by mid- morning to seal the glare o u t s i d e a n d a d a r k e n e d room will hold ten or fifteen d e g r e e s c o o l e r t h a n t h e s t r e e t ; t h e h e a v y w o r k i s d o n e a t d a w n , t h e e a r l y afternoon is surrendered altogether, and life resumes o n l y o n c e t h e s u n h a s d r o p p e d b e h i n d t h e rooftops. The old southern name for that rhythm, the c o n t r o r a , describes the shuttered dead hours after lunch when nothing stirs and nothing is meant to, and i t h a s b e e n r e t u r n i n g t o towns that had half forgotten it. You can feel the whole country tilting its day toward the cooler hours: lunch drifts toward two, dinner toward nine or later, the evening passeggiata fills the corso the moment the air turns bearable, and the piazzas stay loud with children well past eleven. This summer custom has been backed up b y l a w , a s r e g i o n a f t e r region, from Lazio and Tus- cany to Puglia, Piedmont and Liguria, signed ordi- nances forbidding out- door labor in the fields, on the scaffolding and on the delivery routes through the worst of the afternoon, from h a l f p a s t t w e l v e u n t i l four. A century of progress, and the country has arrived back at the plain good sense o f i t s g r a n d p a r e n t s : i n a weather as hot as this, you do not fight the afternoon, you wait it out. Around this larger rhythm cluster the small rituals, the l i t t l e p l e a s u r e s I t a l y h a s always used to make the heat more bearable, at times even fun. In Sicily, the summer breakfast is a granita, lemon or almond or coffee, scooped into a soft brioche and eaten before the day catches fire. Elsewhere, there is the after- noon gelato, the wedge of c o l d w a t e r m e l o n f r o m a roadside stall, the espresso taken freddo, the paper fan worked in a stifling church, the broad shade of a beach u m b r e l l a p l a n t e d a t f i r s t light to hold a family's patch of sand. In Rome and other cities people still cup their hands to drink and cool off at the nasoni, the cast-iron street fountains that have poured cold water for well over a century. None of this is new, which is rather the Waiting out the heat: how Italy is rethinking its relationship with summer FRANCESCA BEZZONE NEWS & FEATURES TOP STORIES PEOPLE EVENTS CONTINUED TO PAGE 6 A visitor seeks relief from the summer heat in the shade of a Roman street as temperatures rise across the city (Image generated using Adobe Illustrator AI)

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