Is it getting hot in here?

Yep, it’s hot. And here’s how I am coping in a land with almost no air conditioning and heat into the 100 degrees. Although we have not had it as bad as many places it’s still enough to completely change my daily routine, and mood. In a good moment I can appreciate that the sunflowers are at their crazy best and the cicadas are singing, although the chickens at the farm stand have stopped laying and our cats remain motionless on the stone floor for most of the day, which does remind me of the physical toll of this kind of heat. I read a fascinating article in the NYTimes about the impact that heat has on intelligence and mood. So if you catch any misspellings, you know why.

Our house is made with thick stone walls, around two feet, which provide some insulation. We open the windows at night to try to cool the walls and floors as much as possible and then close the windows, outside shutters, and inside scuri to put as many layers of protection between us and the sun as possible when it starts to heat up around 8 am. The scuri are wooden panels on hinges that you can close over the windows on the inside and it is not an accident that the word scuro also means dark. The effect of these heat shields being in place is quite cave-like in certain rooms. I saw Dune for the first time and the heat protection techniques they were using on Arrakis felt like my daily life. Minus all the really great hair.

We broke down this year and got air conditioning in the rooms on the back side of the house—the kitchen and a couple of bedrooms. This has been a game changer for sleep on particularly hot nights, but we use it the minimum possible, set as high as tolerable, using fans to help keep cool, and with all the other temperature mitigation procedures still in place.

During daylight hours, within our dark rooms, I rarely leave the side of my fan, even with the AC on. Which may, or may not, have had an odd side effect on our dog, Lola. She’s often at my side, so is equally often in front of a fan. Lola likes to pull on the leash and we often forget her walking halter. We’d taken her to lunch with us and on the way into the restaurant she’d seen something interesting and was pulling unusually hard on her collar. Later that day she started having a very dry, continuous cough. I start searching the internet and was convinced that she had developed a collapsed trachea from damage to her throat from pulling on her collar.

I rushed her to the vet as soon as they opened after their four-hour lunch break. Fortunately, unlike most emergency visits to the doctor with our children, she was still coughing and spewing when we got to the vet. He took one look at her and asked if we had air conditioning or were using fans. When he learned that she was frequently in front of the fan he said that was the reason for the cough—he’d seen five other dogs with the same issue in the previous few days. Avoid fans and drafts and she would be fine. I was convinced he was crazy because heat is a trigger for symptoms of a collapsed trachea and it could be that these five dogs also had this undiagnosed condition that the heat brought on. The old correlation/causation chicken and egg. But weirdly enough, she has been fine since we’ve kept her away from me and the fan.

This diagnosis should not have surprised me. The Italians we know fear drafts. We were having lunch in a restaurant that had air conditioning on a particularly scorching day, and we were seated right under it, enjoying the respite. Six people were shown to the adjoining table. They looked with great concern in our direction and I was worried that one of the kids was scared of dogs, because Lola was with us. They exited in about a second with fear on their faces and went to an outside table in the heat. Sebastian said they’d told the waitress that they were all sweaty and couldn’t possibly sit in front of an air conditioner or they would all get sick.

During the height of Covid, in the winter of 2020, we were not eating inside restaurants. On a road trip Donella and I stopped at a restaurant to have lunch which was packed with people eating inside. We asked if we could sit at an outdoor table right next to the front door. The waitress started complaining to the manager that by going in and out into the cold she would surely get sick. She seemed unconcerned about working in a room with a hundred unmasked people in close quarters in the days before the vaccine.

Because I need more exercise than getting out of bed and up from my desk to adjust the fan my big adventure of the day is to go to the local pool, run by a family. It’s a fantastic Italian social scene populated by everyone from grandparents to the tiniest babies. I’ve never heard a word of English spoken. It’s the kind of place where I leave my wallet and phone in full view while I swim, without a problem.

I game my entry carefully and try to get there late enough that most people will be leaving so that I can have the pool relatively empty so I can swim some laps, and so that the dad will let me in at a discount. Even at six the pool is usually packed and I am the only one trying to swim anywhere. There are more kids than I can count and the water is always unusually warm. This makes me glad that I swim with my head above water. The visibility my technique provides is a good thing because it has never entered the head of anyone who is standing in the pool to get out the way of someone trying to swim.

There’s only one lane. For some reason this seems to be the most attractive spot for groups of people to stand in the water and talk. When I am swimming I sometimes remember when we still lived in Berkeley and I was swimming one evening in the pool at the club we belonged to. The whole pool was divided into lanes and there were two people sharing every lane except for one. The lone swimmer was at the other end of the long pool and I slipped into the water and started swimming. When we met in the lane mid pool the other swimmer started shouting at me because she didn’t want to share a lane. I often want to plunk her in this Italian pool, just to watch her reaction.

When I swim in the main part of the pool it gets even more interesting as there are kids diving, people playing ball games, couples cuddling and flirting, and many more people standing in groups talking. Not to mention the occasional pool floating toy days which I can never keep track of. I try the best I can to weave through it all and avoid getting hit in the head by a ball or run into more than once. Today there was a very cute little Italian boy wearing Spiderman arm floaties who had an industrial strength water gun and was soaking everyone in the face. This is when having one’s head above water is not ideal. (Armed Spiderman is much better than Little Lorenzo, who terrorizes the entire pool daily with his screaming when he has to get out of the water, much to his mother and grandmother’s horror.)

There is also a swim class taught by the daughter of the family who runs the pool. The class is mostly made up of eight to ten-year-old boys and the instructor wears a constantly changing selection of the tiniest bikinis I’ve ever seen, either on a Kardashian or in real life. I am sure the boys don’t notice.

Last year, the pool was frequented by about twenty very fit guys. They’d usually arrive en masse just as I was getting out and all jump in, doing laps while waiting for their coach. He’d arrive with a boombox and start yelling out instructions for aqua aerobics like a drill sergeant, while being backed up by bouncy, usually American, pop hits. I found this very amusing to watch while drying off. One day they arrived earlier than usual when I actually got to swim in the one lane, enjoying the blissful emptiness. They started doing a chorus line high kicking move in a circle, with their arms linked. The whirlpool effect was powerful—I’d be hurdled to one end of the pool at lightning speed just to turn around and barely be able to struggle back to the other end. I asked the owner of the pool about them and they were a volleyball team doing some cross-training. They seem to have found another form of exercise this summer, much to my disappointment.

The grocery store is another air-conditioned mecca, but equally crowded. Sometimes I forget that the Italian ideal is not one of efficiency—get in and get out as quickly as possible—but one of social optimization. The more people you see and the longer it takes, the better. This often means that I leave my cart in a corner and ferry purchases back to it because it is too complicated to get my cart through the aisles on a Saturday morning, which is prime time. Like at the pool, there’s little of the American sense of personal space—I pull my cart to the side so that others can get by. But I am the only one. Carts are abandoned crosswise in the middle of aisles, or a whole group of carts are grouped around the one with the baby in it. It’s also the kind of place where I went to the customer service booth with a question and the woman there spent about five minutes trying to solve it. With many thousands of euros of cash on the counter next to her in plain view and easy reach. She was completely unphased.

It’s in these moments that my Americanness runs full tilt into my adopted homeland. Why can’t I just efficiently exercise and cool down? Why can’t I get my cart through the aisles on a Saturday morning? Because that’s not what’s important here. Efficiency, competitiveness, and the sense of entitlement of my lane partner in California who didn’t want to share has nothing to do with the daily reality here and I am the better off for it. These things—flirting in the pool, Spiderman with his water gun, Lorenzo’s tantrums, the lateral tossing ball game with six players who use the entire width of the pool—are the things that people remember and that matter. How many laps I swam is meaningless and I know it.

We had American friends visiting and I was hanging out late at night with their eleven-year old in a park watching everyone from three-year olds playing soccer to old men playing bocce ball. I was telling her that everyone knew each other and that the three-year olds would turn into the old men, probably in the same park. She said that she was discovering that Italy was like a peach, easy to break through skin with sweetness inside. And that Americans were more like dragon fruit, very hard to break through the surface, but still sweet inside. I am enjoying that thin skin and the easily accessible sweetness inside.