234. Hot Stuff

Hot, hotter, hottest.

It seems every summer, we read about record-breaking heat across Europe, with Italy always on the list of the worst of the worst. I subscribe to a number of Italy travel groups on Facebook, and many of the posts are devoted to complaints about the extreme summertime temperatures, or advice on how to deal with them, with suggestions like wearing a portable fan around your neck or staying in your hotel room all day with the shades down. As Americans, many of us have the luxury of air-conditioned homes, cars and workplaces, and we have to remember to bring a sweater to go shopping, as the supermarkets are so cold. So I figured the complainers were mostly whiny Americans, who were too weak to deal with a little discomfort.

Well, add me to the weak and whiny club. Once again, Italy is dealing with an unbreakable wave of extreme heat, as is the U.S., it turns out. I thought I had outsmarted it by making sure we had stints in the mountains and the seashore, but in a cruel twist of fate, this summer in Italy, those spots seem to be hotter than the cities. Everywhere we went, including Sanremo on the Italian Riviera, it was hot and muggy, with temperatures in the nineties, and while the air conditioning helped, it was not nearly strong enough. Taking a shower was a wasted effort, because you’d only be covered in sweat ten minutes later.

So what to do? I figured the only reasonable thing was to lean into it, and spend a day at the beach. Italian beaches are set up differently than ours, mostly divided into private clubs that you pay to enjoy for the whole season or just for the day.

For your fee, you get chairs and an umbrella, and use of a changing room. So we paid and were escorted to our spot and settled in for a morning of reading and napping by the side of the Mediterranean.

Unlike Americans, Italians don’t bring a picnic to the beach, or gigantic coolers of snacks and cold drinks. Instead, they go to the beach club’s restaurant, and have a proper sitdown lunch, often with wine. The club where we were didn’t even offer sandwiches, but we could have ordered pasta, grilled fish, or other things Americans would think of as dinner food.

In Gaeta, my father’s hometown further south, they had an expression “only mad dogs and Englishmen” go to the beach in the afternoon because it’s so hot. So even though we had paid for the full day, we decided after lunch to heed that wisdom, and head to the hotel pool instead.

On overseas trips, Ben will wear a baseball cap with some sort of identifying, conversation-starting logo. The best catch was in Rome once, when a priest who was a Harvard alum razzed him about his Yale cap. So as we were strolling along the beach in Sanremo, a young couple delightedly yelled “Hey, Phillies!” Turns out they live very close to us, and come to Italy all the time, especially for the biking. This random encounter inspired us to rent bikes for a 10-mile ride along the coast the next morning.

Was it hot? Yup, wicked hot.

But the important thing is, I didn’t waste my time here. I did beach and bike and pool and my morning run — and didn’t let the heat be the boss of me. And I will cherish these memories next January when I’m bellyaching about the cold.