On a baking hot night this summer, my neighbours headed into the street to discuss an attempted burglary that had taken place minutes earlier. Two men had tried to climb into a first-floor flat, they said, after the owner threw open his windows in an effort to feel the faint breeze.
“I didn’t hear anything,” one neighbour boasted. “I had my windows shut and my new air conditioning turned up.”
From her tone, she seemed to be describing a cutting-edge, futuristic gadget, rather than the squat AC unit parked on her balcony. Her excitement about air conditioning is shared by many Romans, who this summer cleaned out the city’s electrical stores. Anyone who tried to buy a unit in August was told to come back in October.
This Roman revolution comes after years of distrust of air conditioning, driven by the fear of an ailment to which only Italians seem to succumb: the colpo d’aria, literally “blow of air”, the sudden cold draught that they believe leads to red puffy eyes, dizziness, chronic neck pain and even pneumonia.
“I signed up to a gym because they had AC,” an American expatriate in Rome said. “But the Romans I met there were all complaining about it, claiming they wouldn’t be able to sweat
while the dangerous cold air was blowing.”
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Hence the sight of Italian women in gyms wearing scarves as well as leotards. “Women, but also men, put their hoods up when they go on the treadmill,” the American said.
For centuries Rome did not really need air conditioning. The city was strategically located to catch a sea breeze, the ponentino, which cooled the scorching summers. Office workers and shop owners coped by going home for lunch during the hottest hours before disappearing to the beach for the whole of August.
Families stuck in Rome would take a table up to the Gianicolo hill overlooking the city at night and play cards under the trees until it was cool enough to return home.
Life was so well organised around the heat that there was little need for air conditioning — an ecological approach to life before there was a green agenda.
Rome still shuts down in August, but in recent years things have begun to change. In the 1970s a new nine-storey high, one-kilometre-long council block called Corviale, built between Rome and the sea, helped to snuff out the ponentino breeze.
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This century Italy’s grinding recession and high unemployment has meant that shorter lunch breaks are the norm, while many can’t afford to take the summer off.
As small shops have been squeezed out in the past decade by big chains that open at lunchtime, Romans got a taste for air conditioning. I recall watching pensioners wheel empty trolleys around supermarkets, buying nothing but surreptitiously enjoying the cool air.
Then, last month, came a heatwave so brutal that weathermen dubbed it Charon, after the ferryman who carried the souls of the dead. At Orbetello, north of Rome, 200 tonnes of fish perished in the heat at the fish pens that feed the capital.
And so, finally, air conditioning triumphed, and now my neighbourhood hums like a power station at night as residents sit in their sealed, cooled homes, their units belching heat out into the street.
Some have had regrets, however. An Italian acquaintance who installed AC at her beach house at Sabaudia, south of Rome this year, suffered dizziness and neck ache after she made the fatal error of leaving it on as she slept.
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“It wasn’t just me,” she said. “I went to the local physiotherapist, and the waiting room was full of other AC users rubbing their necks.”