The death toll is mounting from this summer’s European
heat wave, now well into its third month. An estimated 10,000
Frenchmen have died from heat stroke, dehydration and other
heat-related causes this month alone. Portugal’s national health
institute reports 1,300 heat-related deaths since the beginning of
July. And in the same period, high temperatures have reportedly
raised mortality rates in Naples, Italy, by as much as 50 percent
among the elderly and 70 percent among infants.
Most of us, thankfully, have nothing worse to fear from the
weather than extreme discomfort. As a native of Washington, D.C.
(which the British Foreign Office supposedly once classified a
tropical posting), I ought to bear 100+ temperatures with aplomb.
Yet nothing in my upbringing prepared me for this. Because
Washington, like every other American city south of Boston, lies
within the domain of climate control.
As everybody knows who’s ever been here in warm weather,
Europeans are strangers to the charms of artificial cooling. While
nearly 75 percent of U.S. homes have
air conditioning, according to the New York Times, the
figure for France is under 5 percent. My guess is that it’s lower
in Italy, though it gets even hotter here.
Higher electricity rates and environmental concerns are two
commonly cited reasons for Europe’s resistance to AC. These might
be significant factors in France and elsewhere, but I can’t take
them seriously with regard to where I live. Italians spend more
than any other E.U. nation on clothes and shoes, and if they cared
about staying cool, they would find the money to do it. As for the
environment, recycling is still a foreign concept here, and dumping
industrial waste one of the Mafia’s fastest growing businesses. No
one I’ve met is eager to sweat to save the ozone layer.
A more plausible incentive for staying hot is the excuse to go
on vacation. It’d be pretty hard to justify the exodus that
Italians make every August (along with the French, the Spanish,
etc.) were it not so obviously unbearable to stay in town. But
offices and shops are increasingly air-conditioned, and open
year-round, so this is yet another battle that leisure is bound to
lose to globalization.
The essence of Italians’ aversion to air conditioning is not
prudence, altruism or sloth but something much harder for even the
most powerful economic and social trends to beat; namely, fear.
Italians are utterly terrified of the cold, in particular of cold
air. There’s no end to the list of maladies — including backaches,
kidney trouble and paralysis — that Italians attribute to drafts
(colpi di freddo).
My Italian wife is a woman of science, a biology teacher in
fact, yet she cannot shake off traditional beliefs. That’s why our
almost-new Japanese air conditioner has sat in storage for the
entire infernal summer. It might be all right to experiment with
such technology if we didn’t have a small child.
In this respect as in others, four years’ residence here have
taken their toll on my common sense. The low temperature in Rome
the other night was 66 degrees, yet I found myself waking in the
dark to what felt like an icy blast through the window, worried
that my son might have caught a chill.
Of course, we Americans exaggerate too. After her first visit to
a Stateside multiplex, my wife quite reasonably asked why it should
be necessary to wear a sweater when going to the movies in July.
Occasional contact with the open air, even when it’s muggy, is a
salutary reminder that we are part of nature.
But this inevitably brings me to another complaint about Italy.
Given the lack of air conditioning, and the abundance of mosquitoes
in so much of the country, why has it never occurred to
anyone here to put screens on the windows? I could
speculate but there’d be no point. Italians, like any other nation,
are ultimately unfathomable to strangers. And after all, summer is
nearly over.
