ROME LETTER/PADDY AGNEW: The heat, it seems, can do strange things, not just to people but also to entire landscapes. Right now the good burghers of Macugnaga on the slopes of Mount Rosa, high in the Alps, are desperately worried about possible flooding from the aptly named "Lake Ephemeral", just above their village.
Lake Ephemeral, formed by run-off from the Belvedere glacier, has apparently come and gone over recent years. At the moment, in the wake of unseasonally high late-June temperatures that accelerated glacier melt-down, it is most definitely there and threatening. Civil Defence Agency operatives, complete with water-scooping machines, are apparently poised and ready to deal with the problem.
For all of us, albeit in a much less dramatic manner, the season of the Great Heat presents plenty of familiar problems. The other day I came across The Baroness (Herself) taking up a most unusual pose by the French window that leads from her study on to the terrace.
In theory, she was busily engaged in the correction of various tesi (degree theses) proffered by final-year university students. In practice, she stood poised (like the civil defence guys) at the door, with a rolled up tesi in hand, ready to smite an unsuspecting mosquito.
Some might argue that university learning was rarely put to such good use. Whichever way you see it, we can report that the mosquito in question bit the dust and that the Baroness returned to her corrections, with a sense of mission accomplished, if admittedly with a slightly bent exam paper.
This is the time of year when a veritable armoury of "anti-mozzer" devices have to be wheeled out in the never-ending battle against our blood-sucking little insect friends. Citronella (lemongrass) is the key to survival. Citronella plants, citronella candles, citronella spirals, storm lamps that run on citronella oil, not to mention a variety of sprays for the human body, are all summoned for a battle that has much to do with our location, caught between a lake and an indigenous oak wood.
Mosquitoes and how to deal with them are a quintessential part of the summer in these parts. For a start, it helps greatly if one can learn the art of moving around the house at night in the dark, stumbling on to the dimly lit terrace where dinner is eaten rigorously by lamp light. Electric lights can simply never be turned on, otherwise our little friends are attracted like a flash.
Shutters and windows must be kept shut right through the heat of the day to keep the heat out, with windows (but not shutters) opened up in the evening to allow for a cooling breeze. At this point, of course, visitors from dull, wet northern climes will arrive, insisting that they love the heat and opening up everything in sight.
Of course they love the heat. Just let them try to make four appointments in different parts of Rome on a morning when the street temperature is stuck at 37°.
Like people around the world, Italians love to speculate on the long-term climatic impact of the infamous hole in the ozone layer, or so-called Greenhouse Effect. Everyone says it is getting hotter and drier, both earlier and for longer, summer after summer. Judged by the shallower-than-ever condition this summer of our lake, Lago di Bracciano, not to mention the Belvedere glacier melt-down up in Piedmont, they could be right.
At dinner the other night Mario, a guest, was speculating that he would install air-conditioning in a new house he is about to build. This, too, is a new development since Italians have traditionally been loath to use air-conditioning in the home, being only truly comfortable with it in the context of the motor car and/or office.
The way to deal with the heat has always been to escape to the seaside, the country or the mountains. Even the younger members of the family follow that trend, albeit independently. The youngest brat around here this morning heads off to the first of two campus (summer camps), one of them high in the Dolomites and the other in the French Alps.
We, too, will soon take to the road on the biannual expatriate pilgrimage back to the cool green of the auld sod.