Italy split in two! No, not politically, though with the current government it certainly appears to be. Neither regarding the chestnut of being in the EU: the ghastly errors perpetrated by the 2016 UK referendum have put a stop to that idea. No it’s the weather. While southern Italy, and particularly Sicily, is suffering Rhodes-style with forest fires blamed, probably rightly, on mafia instigated pyrotechnics the north is being whitened and wiped out by hail storms and tornadoes. Milan, for example, has had its transportation reduced by almost half with fallen trees crashing on its viali with some citizens and countless cars harmed and damaged.
What has caused all this? Another split emerges, an ideological one. Is it global warming or a cyclical manifestation of nature? In my mind it’s both. Italy is not only fragile geologically but also highly tenuous climatologically. Poised between alpine snows and desert winds, surrounded on both sides by seas of very different characters, Tyrhenian and Adriatic, with every kind of landscape ranging from vast wolf-inhabited forests to flamingo-paddled marshlands , Italy clearly has very climatically opposed regions so close to one another.
Surely Britain suffers from its contrasting regions? Yes but not quite to the same extent. The moderator of the sea, that immense natural matriarch surrounding these islands, a sea both calm and tempestuous, a sea so sonorously described in the four interludes from Britten’s ‘Peter Grimes’, tempers the British climate. I thought I’d never miss those BBC weather forecasts like ‘rainy with sunny intervals’ or (alternatively) ‘sunny patches with showers’ but I do now in a land where it’s either torrid sun or thunder and lightning for whole afternoons, where hailstones fall greater than the size of golf balls and where too much sun can drive one to a cancer skin clinic.
‘Land where lemon trees grow’? Yes, of course, despite the fact that Cornwall is now another peninsula where fine wines are produced. But I just wonder where all this will end. Will Italy still be that ‘bel paese’ or will climatic change increasingly press upon it and produce, in addition to its well-documented earthquakes, ever more cataclysmic hail storms in mid summer, devastating forest fires and disastrous landslides?
One thing is sure: I won’t be there to say very much more..
