L'Italo-Americano

L'Italo-Americano THURSDAY, JULY 23, 2026 www.italoamericano.org 6 NEWS & FEATURES TOP STORIES PEOPLE EVENTS point: the heat is an ancient adversary here, and Italians keep a long and well-stocked armory against it. The adjustment is visible in the cities themselves, too, where shade, water, and tim- ing have become part of the d a i l y c a l c u l a t i o n . P e o p l e cross a piazza by following the narrow shadow cast by a church façade, choose the bus stop with a tree rather than the one closest to home, and learn which side of the street will be bearable at four in the afternoon. Municipal foun- tains, public gardens, covered markets, and air-conditioned libraries become informal refuges, especially for older residents and those whose homes trap the heat. Even ordinary errands are reorga- nized: groceries are bought e a r l y , a p p o i n t m e n t s a r e moved to the morning, and outdoor tables remain empty until evening, when they fill almost at once. This has also made Italians more conscious of who can and cannot escape. The heat is easier to manage from a shaded house, a mountain rental, or a place by the sea than from a top-floor apart- ment, a construction site, or a delivery scooter. Summer has become, in other words, also a matter of public health, work, housing, and access to cool spaces. Whole cities still empty out in August, when the Ferragosto exodus sends Italians streaming toward the water, and that old ritual is one the heat has both sharp- ened and started to redirect. The sea remains as beloved as ever, yet more and more Italians now look up rather than out, toward the moun- tains, where a valley in the D o l o m i t e s o r t h e w e s t e r n Alps sits in the fifties and low sixties while the plains below bake. The cool hill country fills with families in agritur- i s m i , a n d t h e n o r t h e r n lakes draw those who want the water without the crush of the coast. Valleys that once filled only for the ski season now book out in July and August as well, their hotels and mountain refuges turn- ing the summer into a sec- ond high season. Altitude, this summer, has become the new luxury. Foreign visitors seem to be thinking the same way, a n d t h i s i s b e g i n n i n g t o redraw the map of Italian tourism. For generations, the recipe has always been the s a m e : c o m e i n J u l y o r August, see Rome, Florence, and Venice, roast cheerfully, and fly home with a sunburn. That recipe is now breaking down, and the travel trade has taken to talking, a little clumsily, of the "coolca- tion," the holiday chosen above all for its temperature, with Italy's northern moun- tains among the continent's favorite answers to it, offer- ing Alpine air in the sixties w h i l e t h e s o u t h e r n c i t i e s shimmer past a hundred. Others keep the destination and merely move the date, so that spring and fall, the so-called shoulder sea- sons, are swelling as travel- ers finally understand the obvious: a Roman forum or a F l o r e n t i n e g a l l e r y i s f a r kinder to walk in the soft warmth of May or October than under the hammer of high summer. The great art c i t i e s , m e a n w h i l e , a r e increasingly left in the deep of summer to the visitors alone, their own residents having long since fled for the coast or the hills. Heat, as the industry now bluntly puts it, has stopped being back- g r o u n d a n d b e c o m e a booking factor, something people plan around the way they once planned around the price of the airfare. U n d e r n e a t h a l l o f t h i s , something larger is stirring, and it points toward a better way of traveling. A city at 104°F is no place for the old t o u r i s t f o r c e d m a r c h , t h e sprint from monument to monument with a phone held overhead, and the heat push- es visitors, almost despite themselves, into a gentler manner of going: the early walk through streets still cool a n d h a l f a s l e e p , t h e l o n g shaded lunch, the afternoon spent not in a ticket queue but in a kitchen learning to pull orecchiette by hand, or h i g h i n a m o u n t a i n m a s o where the air is sweet and the pace is set by the animals. It nudges people off the blazing main square and into the vil- l a g e s o f t h e i n t e r i o r , t h e borghi that keep their cool behind thick stone and nar- row lanes, many of them the very towns our readers' own f a m i l i e s o n c e c a m e f r o m . W h a t b e g i n s a s a w a y t o e s c a p e t h e h e a t c a n t u r n , with very little prompting, into the slower, deeper, more rooted kind of journey that Italy has always rewarded best. The Italian summer, then, is not disappearing so much as changing form, folding itself around the heat the way it once used to: retreating to the shade at noon and wak- ing again at dusk, climbing t o w a r d t h e m o u n t a i n s , spreading out into the edges of spring and fall. There is loss in that, and real hard- ship on the worst days, and no one in Italy pretends oth- erwise, but there is an old truth resurfacing, too: the w a y t h r o u g h a n I t a l i a n August was never to conquer it, only to slow down, seek the cool, and let the day set its own terms. Which, as it happens, is not a bad way to see the country, either. The Italian summer is not disappearing so much as changing form, folding itself around the heat the way it once used to: retreating to the shade at noon and waking again at dusk, climbing toward the mountains, and spreading out into the edges of spring and fall CONTINUED FROM PAGE 4 A woman opens the wooden shutters of her home during the cooler morning hours, following a traditional Italian method of keeping indoor spaces comfortable in summer (Image generated using Adobe Illustrator AI)

• Cover