The Italy Summer Survival Guide (From People Who Actually Live Here)
For those of us in Florence, we are all hiding in our respect cave like offices and homes from what is a very very hot June. So how do we deal with summer? Let's get into it!
The city is currently sitting under Italy's maximum heat alert, bollino rosso, alongside Rome, Turin, Bologna and Brescia as the health ministry escalated heatwave warnings to the highest level for those cities as intense, early‑season heat spreads across the country.
The culprit is an African anticyclone meteorologists have nicknamed "Cerberus," which is producing temperatures with little variation between day and night, with nights offering little respite as minimum temperatures fail to drop below 24-25°C in many areas.
Meteorologists warn this spell of anomalous heat could potentially rival the extreme summer of 2003, with conditions not expected to ease significantly until early July, and it's part of a wider pattern, with red alerts also in place across the UK, France and Spain as a fresh bout of extreme heat pushed temperatures beyond 40°C this week.
So what does that mean for us?
This week's episodes dives into the reality of life in Italy during the summer, the heat-survival habits that we use, and what's still, honestly, worth staying for.
In this episode —
— Tourist Florence vs. resident Florence: how the city splits into two parallel realities every summer, why Florence's bowl geography traps heat worse than the coast, and what disappears (pharmacist, plumber, commercialista) when everyone who isn't a tourist leaves
— Ferragosto, decoded: the real history behind August 15th: from Emperor Augustus's pagan harvest festival through the Church's 6th-century absorption of the date to Mussolini-era cheap train tickets, and what it's actually like to live through it as a non-Italian without the family infrastructure for it
— Heat survival as local practice: the corrente (which honestly doesn't work when it's consistently 40 degrees celsius), the noon-to-7pm schedule rewrite, Florence's free water fountains, and the unglamorous truth about where Florentines actually go to cool off (hint: it's not the beach). COOP or Esselunga.