By now you’ve probably seen the heat-map graphics with Florence shaded an alarming dark red.
The weather station at Peretola has now logged eight consecutive days at or above 36°C, a feat that has never happened in more than seventy years of continuous record-keeping here. I was partly inspired to write this after seeing Lindsey Tramuta cover this topic about France’s boiling temperatures.
The city’s maximum heat alert has been active for days with no real relief promised before July (ok that’s next week but still, your girl is waiting). On Wednesday, the Uffizi’s air conditioning failed outright causing the museum to stop selling tickets and ration entry while tourists lined up sweating in direct sun outside one of the most visited buildings on earth.
A sobering local headline caught my eye this week, claiming that current temperatures in Florence have surpassed those in Gambia.
It’s a staggering stat, and my thoughts immediately turn to the laborers working under the baking sun on the tram line extension from Piazza della Libertà to Bagno a Ripoli.
For the construction crews, as well as the commuters, pedestrians, and brave cyclists navigating the area, the project has become a grueling Dante-Inferno’s-like gauntlet of hazy heat, thick dust, and deafening noise.
The people who can’t retreat into AC are the ones absorbing this directly.
Case in point, Florence’s metropolitan authority chose not to switch on school cooling systems until June 15th this year, by which point classes were essentially finished, citing energy costs and environmental targets.
Our school, which is private, also doesn’t hair air-conditioning even in the rooms directly under the roof.
Sesto Fiorentino’s Liceo Agnoletti , a few minutes from where Valentina and I record our podcast every week, became the flashpoint, with students sitting finals in rooms running on forced ventilation switched on before the doors opened, while city councillors argued in public over whose budget this falls under.
Yet… banks and Coop, Esselunga and other offices seem to have no issue with getting air con.
There’s also the cost.
Federconsumatori Toscana estimates a family running a unit five hours a day this summer is looking at a 30 to 40 percent jump in their electricity bill (we are screwed). For anyone over 75, for whom that unit functions less like comfort and more like medical necessity, that’s not a small number to find every month on a modest pension.
My mind keeps coming back to 2003, because it was a year when Florence hit 41.1°C (105.98°F) that summer, a record at the time. Istat’s own retrospective count put excess deaths across Italy that summer at close to 20,000, overwhelmingly elderly people living alone, a figure roughly five times higher than the government’s initial public estimate.
Twenty-some years and several “worst since 2003” summers later, it would seem that the trend is that this will only become more of a thing and definitely more frequent than before.
Which is why I get personally so irked at climate change deniers or people sneering at the need for air-conditioning, because yes, it can make the difference between life and death for some.
Valentina and I spent this week’s podcast episode breaking down the actual mechanics of surviving an Italian summer, and no, I don’t mean the lemon-dress, Amalfi-Coast fantasy version, rather the sweaty reality that most of us live in while trying to run errands and work.
Our real-world playbook: Less synthetic fabrics, more linen. Carry water. Never book a single thing between 12 PM and 6 PM. Locate your nearest free fountain (Piazza della Signoria has a great one) and apply that to a wet neck bandana. Wear sunscreen and a hat. And finally, accept that getting pooped on by a pigeon is, technically, a sign of good luck.
Also in this week’s episode, we dived deep into the history of Ferragosto: from the Roman emperor it’s named after, to the Mussolini-era cheap train tickets that turned it into a mandatory national shutdown, to the non-negotiable watermelon. If you want the full breakdown, listen to the new episode here.
These are recommendations by my friends that I am super excited to dive into. Please share any interesting reads for this list in the comments.
The Au Pair by Teddy Wayne: Domestic tension, immense wealth, and someone else raising your kids.
I’ll Take the Fire by Leïla Slimani (trans. Sam Taylor): A woman carving out a free life in socially conservative, late-20th-century Morocco.
Beginning Middle End by Valeria Luiselli: A mother and teenage daughter head to Sicily after a marriage dissolves, digging up a family history neither of them fully wanted to find.
Switzy by Emma Cline: A retired executive takes a final farewell lap around the people he loves before a scheduled death in Zurich. His memory starts rewriting the past more vividly than the present.
The Brightness by Chad Harbach: Fifteen years after The Art of Fielding, two Midwestern best friends collide with the messy reality of adulthood.
The Things We Never Say by Elizabeth Strout: A high school teacher’s perfectly pleasant life quietly hollows him out from the inside.
One Italian Summer by Rebecca Serle: I’m adding this one for reasons I’m not legally allowed to explain just yet. Consider it required reading for a fun project just about to be launched. I’ll say more next month: keep an eye on this space.
If you want something to actively argue with rather than just nod along to, go read Sema Karaman’s Substack Roots.Place.Elsewhere.
Sema splits her time between Rome and Puglia and has spent the last year building a brilliant case against the way we travel now. It’s not an anti-travel manifesto per say; it’s an indictment of travel as a “gotta do it to be a good person” checklist… a way of proving you were somewhere rather than actually being there.
I especially appreciated her line of “walking around drenched in sweaty tourist merchandise” looking for the world’s largest tiramisu instead of reading a single thing about the history of where they’ve landed? I felt that deep in my soul.
In The Italian Dispatch, Eric J Lyman beautifully compares our impact as tourists to a teenager careless with a borrowed family car, urging us to shift from simply consuming a culture to taking responsibility for it. Can we start a discussion panel? Seriously!
Our diet currently is whatever doesn’t require turning on the oven.
My current rotation:
Cannellini beans tossed with good olive oil and way too much black pepper.
Tuna and tomatoes with red onion and a aggressive squeeze of lemon.
Roasted and sauteed vegetables (zucchini with mint, roasted peppers & tomatoes) served with camembert and bread
3-ingredient salads by Susanna Bowers of The Global Pantry is just the content we need right now to remind us that good food doesn’t need to be complicated. I’ll be using this as my July and August food bible.
GELATO, all of the gelato. Luckily I got to research this for Time Out back in the day and would add to this list Sbrino.
Pesto: but all kinds, made with walnuts or sun-dried tomato with good olive oil, parmesan and garlic and basil. I’m putting it on grilled chicken, in pasta, in sandwiches. Jamie Mackay who dutifully updates on the poltico woes in Italy and beyond has a lovely recipe this week in his newsletter that I’m apt to try.
Fruit and esp fruit in wine like this summer fun concoction shared by judy witts francini on notes.
I haven’t made it yet but I really want to try this recipe for Roasted Pepper Rolls Stuffed with Tuna and Capers by Giulia Scarpaleggia.
For additional food or restaurant tips, check out this page on the blog or consider purchasing my comprehensive guide on Saltete (which I update monthly).
A huge thank you to everyone who commented on or shared my last substack. Navigating creativity slumps, while simultaneously acting as your own PR team, video editor, and social media manager, is exhausting. I’ve always promised to show you the messy bits and be honest about the fact that I don't have it all figured out. Doing anything less would just feel wildly disingenuous
Over to you: What are you reading this summer? And more importantly, what are you eating that doesn’t involve an oven? Stay cool.
A presto,
Georgette
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