The heat that kills: what southern Europe's summer tells us

France recorded more than 5,700 excess deaths during its June heatwave, according to the Guardian. The figure arrives as southern Europe endures another record-breaking stretch of extreme temperatures. These are not abstractions. They are people—the elderly, the isolated, those without air conditioning or the means to flee to cooler ground. The heat kills methodically, and it kills the poor first.

Italy sits in the same latitudes, faces the same atmospheric conditions, and has a population older than France's. Yet the international press offers little sense of how the Italian state is preparing for what appears to be the new seasonal rhythm of the continent. Are cooling centres being opened? Are the vulnerable being tracked? Are hospitals braced? The silence itself is revealing. When the world reports on heat deaths in Europe, it tends to report on France, Germany, Spain—rarely on Italy, as if the country were somehow exempt from the physics that governs the rest of the Mediterranean.

What the heat exposes is not a failure of nature but a failure of preparation. The Guardian's reporting makes clear that excess deaths are not inevitable; they are the consequence of systems that do not reach the people who need them most. Italy's regions vary wildly in their capacity to respond. The North has resources the South does not. Cities have infrastructure the countryside lacks. The question the international press should ask—and we should ask ourselves—is whether a country reporting steady emigration of the young and a shrinking tax base can afford to leave its oldest citizens unprotected when the temperature climbs.

There is a harder truth beneath this. The heat is not coming less often. It is coming more often, and hotter. The excess deaths in France are a preview, not an anomaly. Italy's response to this summer will shape whether next summer's toll is smaller or larger. The world is watching. So far, it sees little sign that anyone is ready.