Welcome to Rome: A Tale of Extreme Heat and Climate Change

My phone buzzed, signaling an incoming message. The text read, “I have heard that it is very hot in Rome,” from a friend living in London. As I read the message, a wave of heat washed over me, both metaphorically and literally. Southern Europe had been hit by two scorching heatwaves, named Cerberus and Charon, reminiscent of mythological figures guarding the gates of Hades.

Here in Rome, tourists sought refuge from the relentless heat at Bernini’s Baroque fountains, while aid stations offered relief and hydration. The oppressive weather made me question if my friend’s son, planning a trip to Rome, was still determined to come. However, my friend Jyoti was optimistic. Her son had grown up playing tennis in Delhi’s scorching summers, accustomed to temperatures reaching 42-45 degrees Celsius.

As a former resident of New Delhi, I understood the intensity of such heat. Walking through the sun-soaked streets of Rome, I could almost feel the ground melting beneath me. Stories of melting sidewalks were common in India, where scorching temperatures were the norm for weeks on end during the summer.

My Italian friends seemed unperturbed by the current heatwave, considering it typical summer weather. Francesca, a childhood friend from Rome, recalled experiencing temperatures of at least 40 degrees Celsius several times in her life. The Italians, like the Indians, had learned to avoid the scorching afternoon heat, dedicating those hours to siestas and seeking refuge indoors.

However, climate change poses a potential threat to Italy’s pleasant climate, transforming it into something resembling India’s dystopian weather. While many Italians continue to enjoy their beachside retreats, the prospect of more frequent and extreme heatwaves looms, forcing them to confront the impact of climate change.

Living in India, I witnessed the divergence in experiences of extreme heat between the wealthy and the poor. The wealthy insulated themselves with air-conditioned comfort, while the poor bore the brunt of scorching temperatures while performing physical labor. The toll of heat-related deaths in India was grim confirmation of this divide.

Now, sitting in my non-air conditioned apartment in Rome, I appreciate the relief brought by the cool night air. But how long will this respite last? I fear that future generations will face a new normal, where weeks of extreme heat become routine and the threshold for truly hot days continues to rise. As Jyoti aptly put it, “There’s a resilience that builds when you face the same harsh conditions over and over again, but eventually, you reach your breaking point.”

As I contemplate the uncertain future, I can’t help but hope that collective action against climate change will prevent us from boiling like the proverbial frog in a pot of water.

Amy Kazmin

My phone rang with an incoming message. “I have heard that it is very hot in Rome”, reads the text of a friend living in London. “Occupy.” Hours later, another message, this time from an old friend in New Delhi, whose college-age son was planning a sightseeing trip to Rome this weekend. Could he stay?

I was taken aback. In the last week or so, southern Europe has been hit by two successive searing heatwaves dubbed respectively Cerberus, the mythological three-headed watchdog, and Charon, the ferryman of Hades.

Here in Rome, tourists churned out at the Colosseum and tried to cool off with furtive splashes from Bernini’s majestic Baroque fountains, while 28 aid stations were set up across the city to offer water and medical assistance. In the midst of this hell, did my friend’s son really still want to come?

My friend, Jyoti, seemed optimistic. His son was a Delhi boy who had grown up playing tennis in the city’s scorching summers, when temperatures often soared to between 42C and 45C. “He IS very heat resistant,” he wrote to me. “The courts in Delhi were crazy and he played every day from eight to 18.”

Having lived for more than a decade in New Delhi myself, I know what that heat feels like. And I was reminded how exhausting living in such a brutal climate can be as I trudged through the unusually desolate, oven-like streets of Rome this week after a meeting that ended at noon.

Rome’s temperature hit a record 41.8 degrees on Tuesday, and as I walked to my office I hit a stretch of sidewalk that had literally melted in the sun. After carefully working my way through the liquefied black goo, I looked back at my footprints, wondering if I’d find them there later once the weather cooled.

Stories about melting sidewalks were common in India, where the kind of sizzling temperatures that now plague Europe typically linger for weeks each summer. And the past few days have seemed like an early warning sign that Italy’s normally pleasant conditions may increasingly resemble India’s dystopian weather as climate change takes hold. But my Italian friends are puzzled by the current excitement over what they consider typical summer weather.

“It seems that the foreign media are more amazed by this heat than the Italians,” said Francesca, who grew up in the 1980s in the same Rome neighborhood where I now live. Despite the record heat this week, she recalled that the mercury reached at least 40C several times in her life, including once when she was a young teenager who had just started wearing heels. If you remember clearly, she said, because her heels sank into the soft, loose floor.

Jyoti recalls that while she was a child in Delhi in the 1970s, 40C was an unusual and dramatic event. In the 90s nobody blinked an eye at 40°C and 42°C days were routine

Like Indians, Italians have traditionally avoided going outside in the summer afternoon heat, while southern Italy even has a word: against — to refer to the hours most conveniently devoted to a nap at that time of year.

Francesca’s grandmother used to warn that going out between noon and 5pm on a summer day was as risky as going out between midnight and 5am, because you didn’t know who you might meet. “Only crazy people go out during the summer when it’s so hot,” my friend recalled her grandmother used to say about her.

It seemed to be Italy’s answer to Noël Coward’s famous song, about how only ‘mad dogs and the English go out in the midday sun’. It was a phrase I often heard in India, where the streets on a Sunday summer afternoon were sometimes so empty and silent that I felt like I was the only person alive.

Many Italian friends share a gut feeling, based on their own memories, that the current weather is consistent with what they expect from a warm country. Visiting a nearby beach this weekend with friends, I wondered if most Italians had noticed the warnings about the heat: the sea was filled with people, merrily partying at sea and in their beloved beach clubs, as much of the country will be doing in the coming weeks.

---

The risk, however, especially for those for whom a sustained escape to the sea is not feasible, is that climate change will make episodes of scorching heat much more frequent – and more extreme, as many Indians are convinced has already happened in their country in recent decades.

Jyoti’s experience is significant. She recalls that while she was a child in Delhi in the 1970s, 40C was still an unusual and dramatic event, prompting families to order children to take cover. When I got there in the ’90s, no one blinked an eye at 40C, and 42C days were routine, with a sprinkling of 44C or 45C days added to the mix.

I’ve learned that in a hot climate it’s best not to live in a top floor apartment, which gets pounded by the sun. My New Delhi landlords all invariably lived on the ground floor, while their tenants rented the warmer apartments above. As your socio-economic status improved, you literally moved on in life – in cooler apartments, downstairs – not up.

Living in a stuffy terrace apartment, known as a cheated – owned by a retired sailor, I’ve developed unusual ways to find relief from the heat, even during frequent power outages that have left me without so much as a ceiling fan. If I soaked in the water, didn’t dry off, and then lay down on the tiled floor, I might briefly feel a little cooler, as the water on my skin evaporated.

Even the water had to be managed. Many property owners in Delhi have huge black tanks on their roofs to store water, as the municipal supply is insufficient and erratic, a problem seen even in poorer parts of Italy, such as Sicily. Yet in the summer the water that flowed from these tubs into my shower or sink from the so-called cold faucet was so hot that it could not be used immediately. Instead, I dumped the water into a giant plastic trash can in my shower, where it stopped and got cold first.

As India has gotten richer, experiences of extreme heat have diverged, with the wealthy largely insulated from hardship. Wealthy Indians live in air-conditioned bubbles – with their apartments, cars, five-star hotels, shopping malls and airports cooled to comfortable levels – and only go out for brief recreation.

The poor, who often perform physical labor in the heat of the day, are left to bear the brunt of the scorching temperatures: Official Indian data suggests 11,000 people have died from heatstroke between 2012 and 2021, with the real toll no doubt higher.

As I sit now in my non-air conditioned apartment in Rome, with the blinds closed to keep the heat out and my floor fan humming at full speed, I feel grateful to be somewhere where the night still cools, allowing me to open the windows for a refreshing breeze and sleep soundly without the noise of an air conditioner.

But I also wonder how long it will last. I fear that one day the children growing up with my 11-year-old daughter here in Rome will look back on weeks like this, and wonder why such levels of heat have become routine and how the threshold for truly hot days has risen higher and higher.

“There’s a resilience that builds when you face the same harsh conditions over and over again,” Jyoti told me. “It’s the same with all species. Like the frog in boiling water, you adjust until you’re dead.

Amy Kazmin is the FT’s Rome correspondent and a previous one South Asia Bureau Chief

Check out our latest stories first – follow along @ftweekend on Twitter