The City Under Glass: Italy's Summer of Heat

The Guardian reports that Italy is to place all of its 27 major cities, from Trieste to Palermo, under the highest heat alert as the fourth heatwave of the summer intensifies, with temperatures edging close to 40C. This is not a story about the south or the north, the coast or the plain. It is a story about the entire country, rendered uniformly vulnerable by a summer that refuses to relent.

For a nation so often narrated through its internal divisions — the prosperous north, the struggling south, the eternal question of what binds them — there is something quietly significant in this map of red alerts. The heat does not recognise the Po Valley's industry or Sicily's agriculture as separate concerns. It treats the peninsula as a single body, and in doing so, it offers a glimpse of a future where the old geographical certainties may matter less than the new climatic ones.

The foreign coverage, naturally, focuses on the practical: how to avoid the worst of it, as the BBC's guide suggests, with its advice on supermarkets and night-time tours. This is the tourist's Italy, the Italy of the summer holiday, and it is real. But the red alert is also the resident's Italy, the Italy of those who cannot flee to the coast or retreat to an air-conditioned museum. The city under glass is beautiful to look at, but it is also a place where people live.

We would note that the world's press, in its annual ritual of reporting the Italian heatwave, tends to treat it as a seasonal curiosity. This year, the uniformity of the alert — all 27 cities, no exceptions — suggests otherwise. The heat is not an interruption of the Italian summer; it is becoming the Italian summer. And as the fourth wave arrives, the question is no longer whether the country can cope with the heat, but whether it can afford to keep treating it as an exception.

What the international coverage captures, perhaps unintentionally, is the way this heat erases the distinctions that usually define Italy. In the red zone, a worker in Milan and a farmer in Palermo share a condition that is more fundamental than their differences. The world sees a country in crisis; we see a country being remade, whether it is ready or not.