Italian weather reporting has a vocabulary all of its own. For a start, the single English word “heatwave” does the work of several Italian terms, each describing a more specific type of intense heat.
Once you’ve figured those out, you’ll need to get to grips with an official system of coloured “stickers” and figure out why characters from Greek mythology and Dante’s Inferno keep popping up in weather forecasts.
Let’s decode some of the terms you’ll encounter every summer.
La canicola
This is the particular word for an extended, oppressive heatwave like the one we’re living through right now.
It comes from the Latin canicula, meaning “little dog”, which was the ancient name for the star Sirius in the constellation Canis Major. The Romans believed that when Sirius rose with the sun in midsummer, it brought the hottest and most difficult days of the year — the dies caniculares, or dog days. Despite this, it’s a common word that’s used all the time in both serious journalism and everyday speech.
You’ll see it in statements like siamo in piena canicola (we’re in the thick of the dog days) or la canicola non dà tregua (the heat shows no sign of letting up).
L’afa / caldo afoso
Not simply another word for heat, afa describes the combination of high temperature and high humidity that makes the air feel suffocating — the opposite of caldo secco (dry heat). Fittingly, the word sounds like the breath you exhale when it’s too hot to move.
A typical weather report might warn: temperature elevate e afa su tutta la pianura padana (high temperatures and oppressive humidity across the whole Po Valley).
L’anticiclone africano / l’anticiclone delle Azzorre
These two phrases are central to understanding why Italian summers have changed.
For decades, the dominant summer high-pressure system over Italy was the anticiclone delle Azzorre (Azores high), an Atlantic system that brought warm but relatively temperate conditions.
READ ALSO: Why Europe is warming faster than the rest of the world
Since the 1990s it has increasingly been replaced by the anticiclone africano (North African anticyclone), a system that originates over the Sahara and draws up hot, dry air that grows hotter still as it is compressed on descent.
When you read l’anticiclone africano si espande verso il Mediterraneo (the African anticyclone is expanding towards the Mediterranean), brace yourself.
Caronte, Minosse, Cerbero
Look at an Italian newspaper in July and you’ll probably read that “Caronte” has arrived, or that “Cerbero” is on its way. These mythological names for heatwaves are an Italian quirk which seem to date back to 2012, when they were first used by Antonio Sanò, founder of the commercial weather site ilMeteo.it — the most popular weather forecasting site in Italy.
He named the first heatwave of that summer “Scipione l’Africano” (after Scipio Africanus, the Roman general who defeated Hannibal in North Africa) and shortly after came “Caronte”, the ferryman of the underworld, chosen because the anticyclone “ferries” hot air from North Africa to Italy.
The names were reused by Italian media and the convention stuck (though they’re not officially recognised by the World Meteorological Organisation, which does not name heatwaves.)
Other names you’ll see in the weather reports include Minosse (the infernal judge from Dante) and Cerbero (the three-headed dog guarding the underworld). So nothing too dramatic, then.
Il bollino rosso / arancione / giallo
As you’ve probably seen in The Local’s news reports, Italy’s health ministry runs a colour-coded heatwave alert system covering 27 towns and cities - capitals of each province - which runs from May to September.
Levels run from green (no risk) through yellow (pre-alert) and orange (risk for vulnerable groups) to red - bollino rosso - which indicates conditions dangerous to the general population, not just the vulnerable, and can only be declared if there are three or more consecutive days of high-risk conditions.
Anyone familiar with Italian bureaucracy may have heard the term bollino used to describe a 'little stamp' or a sticker, so you might imagine the health ministry placing these coloured dots onto a map of Italy each morning.
READ ALSO: What does Italy’s red level heatwave warning mean?
In any case, it's a word you'll hear a lot. Headlines like scatta il bollino rosso in dieci città (red alert declared in ten cities) are a reliable signal to take the heat seriously.
La siccità
In Italy, headlines about drought accompany heatwave coverage every summer, particularly related to water levels on the Po — the country’s longest river and essential to northern agriculture — and water rationing in Sicily and parts of the south.
Unfortunately, every year brings headlines like livelli del Po ai minimi storici (Po levels at historic lows) or razionamento dell’acqua in Sicilia (water rationing in Sicily).
La notte tropicale
Any night when temperatures never fall below 20°C. The term appears regularly in forecasts and it matters to your day to day life: the body needs overnight temperatures to drop in order to recover from daytime heat, and when they don’t, health risks compound. It’s tracked by ISPRA as one of the key indicators of how summers are intensifying.
You’ll see phrases like previste notti tropicali su gran parte del centro-nord (tropical nights forecast across much of the centre-north).
L’isola di calore urbana
The urban “heat island” effect. Concrete, asphalt, stone and dense buildings absorb heat during the day and release it slowly through the night, which is part of the reason why notti tropicali hit urban areas hardest.
City surfaces in Italy’s regional capitals run measurably hotter than surrounding rural areas in summer, which is why a forecast of 36°C in central Rome or Milan can feel like a lot more.
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