The Heatwave and the City

The red alert that now hangs over all 27 of Italy's major cities, from Trieste to Palermo, is a weather warning and something more. The Guardian reported this week that the fourth heatwave of the summer is edging temperatures toward 40 degrees Celsius, and the state has responded with the highest level of alert. But a red alert is a diagnosis, not a remedy. It tells us what is happening to the air, not what is happening to the people who must breathe it.

Consider the image of hundreds of residents of Rome's Spin Time building sleeping in tents outdoors, as Euronews and the Guardian have documented. These are people who lost their roof not to the sun but to a fire, and who now find themselves caught between a government policy of eviction and a heat that makes the street itself a hazard. The heatwave does not discriminate, but the exposure to it does. Those with means retreat to air-conditioned rooms; those without sleep on pavements.

The international press has framed this summer as a story of record temperatures and emergency measures. That framing is accurate but incomplete. What the foreign coverage captures well is the paradox of a wealthy European nation struggling to protect its most vulnerable from a climate it has long helped to create. What it often misses is the quiet, unglamorous work of volunteers and neighbours who have turned the crisis into an occasion for solidarity, as the reports from Rome suggest.

Our pages have long argued that Italy's cities are not just collections of monuments but living systems of care. A heatwave tests that system as surely as an earthquake or a flood. When the red alerts are lifted and the temperatures fall, the question will remain: what kind of city do we want to be when the next wave comes? The world is watching, and it is a question the world, too, must answer.