A summer holiday for Italian families would once have lasted two or three months. It was called ‘la villeggiatura’, a name derived from the old aristocratic practice of removing oneself from the town house to a villa on the family estate. For example, in order to escape from Florence’s torrid summertime heat the Medici would run away to those lovely villas we can see at Artimino, Careggi or Pratolino. Family members would leave in June with the start of school holidays, and the advent of the big heat, to return in mid-September. (Alarmingly this year that heat has come upon us as early as May and record temperatures have already hit 40C).
Husbands would once have remained at work in the emptied towns and cities. So empty, in fact, that radio announcements advised the listener which grocery shops and chemists remained open. As a child I remember Milan, the city where my mother was born, almost deserted in August with few cars on the streets and most bars shuttered – a pre-covidian lock-down in fact.
It was the bread-winners’ lot to be left alone sweltering in the usually non-air conditioned family apartment during the week, to fend for oneself and cope with the most basic domestic tasks like boiling an egg. Of course, for the more ‘furbi’ (cunning) males this situation might have facilitated the conduct of extra marital affairs and the involvement of an ‘amante’ to cook for one. After all, some husbands might have reasoned that they did not know what the wife was up to at her beach resort.
On Fridays the city offices closed and the fathers would motor out to spend the weekend with their families, returning to work the following Monday. I remember once getting a lift from the city to the seaside from one such husband ready to re-join his family by the beach.
The weather would generally be unbroken sunshine until August 15th, which is ‘Ferragosto’ or the Italian August bank holiday. After this date the weather generally broke with precipitous thunderstorms and cooler evenings, a premonition that the holidays were entering their final phase.
With September normalcy returned. Children went back to school, and the main theme among their mates there was “what did you do on your holidays?”
Today things are somewhat different. Holidays have become much shorter for Italians. Instead of paying for one’s place at a ‘stabilimento balneare’ (seaside establishment supplying deck-chairs, sunshades, showers and a bar on a stretch of beach leased from the State ) for two months it’s more often two weeks spent in Sharm El Sheik or, for the more adventurous, the Far East or the Caribbean. Furthermore, holiday traffic migrating en masse locust-like on predetermined weekends and creating vast traffic jams have been increasingly replaced by ‘partenze intelligenti’ or ‘intelligent departures’ where holiday departures are staggered. Actually, with the present world uncertainties ranging from inflation to climate change more and more of us are being encouraged by adverts to become ‘intelligente’. The big thing now is ‘la spesa intelligente’ (intelligent shopping). Basically this means relying on the age-old tradition of shopping lists, realising that in some stores OAPs get a discount on Tuesdays and, of course, searching for those bargain offers.
Things may have been simpler for Italians once as far as holidays were concerned. It’s also true that holidaymakers may have also rather happier than they are today. Families tended to go on holiday together, food would have been more familiar since the majority of vacations tended to be spent in one’s native land and airport chaos would have played a minimal part because ‘cheap’ air travel had not yet been invented.
As the song goes ‘Mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the mid-day sun’. But why? One of the first things I learnt living in Italy is that summers are hot and winters are cold. Obviously! Conversely, one of the first things Italians learn in the UK is that the seasons there often seem all jumbled up in one day.
In Italy, on the other hand there is a time in the year when one changes from winter clothing to summer togs, discarding the winter ones which are put away in a wardrobe until the end of October. So, referring to that Noel Coward ditty, I suspect brits still haven’t got used to the fact that a siesta is absolutely essential if one is to survive the Italian summer – even though we are quite lucky at Bagni di Lucca through the cooling effects of our river Lima (now with a dangerously low water-level because of the appalling lack of rainfall). Speaking of Siestas I think I’ll have one right now. After I was up at 6 am cutting the grass before it became a penitentially hot task to carry out!