Ask and ye shall (sometimes) receive

Dealing with the Italian sun; adventures in expat domesticity

The studio this morning

I feel quite chuffed at having solved a big problem. This is, of course, Italy and the summers are hot. But this year the summer descended upon us like a hammer a month early and about 20% hotter than usual. We've been having a "heat wave" since May 10th and temps are climbing up this weekend to about 112F (44C). But technology and the best landlord in Italy come to the rescue!

I took this apartment, waaaay up on the very tip-top of the mountain, on the strength of it's large "salone" that could be turned into a painting/writing studio, with its row of six double-framed windows. Even back in December, I’d anticipated having difficulties in July.

The space is ideal and quite beautiful and of course you can't beat that view down the Nera valley. 

Italy’s 2022 drought and heatwave

Italy is a hot country, but even we get worse years and better years. This is one of the worse ones. Drought is threatening Italian agriculture in a year where global food shortages and high energy costs are worrying everyone. We had an unusually dry winter, and the Po Valley - that produces nearly all of Italian farm products - is in big trouble. The water in the Po river is so low the Adriatic is pouring in where the river usually pours out, heavily salinating the river for miles upstream. Getting enough water to keep livestock alive is getting to be a pretty scary issue, and crops are dying.

So, in short, we’re having an exciting time over here, and it’s hot enough that the normal protocols aren’t really enough.

The Italian Summer Protocols: or how to live in a country that hates air conditioning

To deal with a normal Italian summer one has to adopt the Italian summer schedule and pace of life, getting up in the pearly pre-dawn light at five am, working between 6:30 or 7:00 and 11, sleeping or resting in the cave-like bedrooms during the hottest parts of the day (3-6 pm) with the windows shut up tight and all blinds down, without the tiniest chink open to let in the sun, until about 8pm, and getting to bed early. 

This is my 14th summer in this country, and every year about this time I face the temptation to move to Norway. But so far it’s been doable. One doesn’t look forward to summer, and one certainly doesn’t enjoy it, far from it. But you can get through it.

We don’t need no stinkin’ air conditioners, Anglo!

Italians aren’t generally into air conditioning at home and for the most part they are a lot hardier than we are in hot weather. They say AC is unhealthy, and there’s quite a lot to this. The only place I’ve ever been where AC was ubiquitous in homes and businesses (Washington DC/Silver Spring, Maryland) everyone was in agreement that the American style AC - where you turn your home into a giant refrigerator - makes everyone sick. Your body can’t handle the fast transitions between extremes.

For the most part I’ve come to agree that it’s better for you to adapt yourself as much as you can to the climate instead of artificially forcing it to go the other way.

But I think Italians underestimate the role of genetics in their magical heat tolerance. It’s certainly true that they tend to have a much lower body mass index than we do, and it’s not just because of our crummy processed foods. They just run their metabolisms at a way higher rev than the people from the Cold Lands. They tend to an ectomorphic body type, are smaller and are just more or less built for this climate after having lived here ten thousand years.

Whereas my ancestors were designed for working outdoors in winter in Scotland.

Stay cheerful and do what the Italians do

But I’ve found it really is possible - even for a pasty Anglo-Irish girl - to adapt and acclimate to a hot climate, and there are things you can do around lifestyle that help a lot. Get up early and do things in the mornings. Don’t lay a lot of things on yourself to do in the hot months. Slow way down, lower your expectations a little and don’t try to keep a white-knuckle grip on life. Be less Anglo, in other words. This isn’t Toronto.

Of course it helps to be in a country where everyone else is also doing these things and the economy and social life, as well as the architecture and urban layout, are designed for it. Italians are great adaptors, much moreso than we Anglos. You’ll have a big adjustment period when you first move here, but you’ll last if you adopt the motto, “How would the Italians deal with this?” (Sometimes the answer is just “stoically and with good cheer,” but that’s helpful too.)

And Italy is set up for and very very accustomed to this annual routine of slowing down in summer. They’ve been living with it a lot longer than most of our countries of origin have even existed.

All the Americans I know can't quite believe we live in this climate without air conditioning, something which would be more or less unthinkable in the US. But one of the reasons is Americans don't build their homes for weather proofing, relying instead on their magical machinery and low-low energy prices.

In Italy, for instance, house walls are often made of stone and are at least 20 inches thick. Have you ever visited caves in the summer? Cold down there isn’t it? So in a stone house the windows are the weakest point, and we do things like this to deal with that: 

Italian heavy blinds - most popular in Lazio (in Umbria you see more shutters than blinds, which don't work as well) - are nothing like the kind of decorative or merely privacy screening blinds you have in North America and Britain. These things are like industrial machinery for your house. They weigh a ton, and can black out a room almost completely.

But there are limits.

This summer has been a particular challenge. The only drawback with the glorious huge and beautifully lit studio is that it's south-west facing, and that has meant this year that the entire south end of the house becomes uninhabitable after about 11 am. Work comes to a halt and all one can do is go down the hall, closing up the interior doors as we go like air locks, to hide in the deep gloom behind the Roman blinds at the north end of the house, feet in a bucket of ice water (thank God for my big freezer chest!) and electric fan on full blast.

The problem is still the sun which is stopped by almost nothing. You can block out the light completely, but the heat still just cooks the blinds themselves throughout the afternoon, which then radiate the heat back into the room. The little sitting room off the kitchen that is normally such a nice place to hang out in the evenings, with the breeze wafting through the curtains, has been turned into a furnace until midnight. With all the protocols assiduously followed the front rooms of the house have been heating up to the mid-80s and even the early 90sF during the afternoons.

The effect on my ability to focus and concentrate on either painting or writing has been ... not so great. Heat like that where there is simply nowhere to escape to turns your brain to mush. Added to this are the hilarious effects chemotherapy had on my endocrine and nervous system. This is where my body goes into a strange kind of panic mode in any temperature above about 22C (71F). There are things I can do to manage it, but it makes things extra challenging.

I’m certainly hard-testing my philosophy that the convenient life is not worth living.

Our Lady of Victories, a commission for a friend in the US. I managed to finish it, but the weather was a big issue, slowing things down

But even worse than just being uncomfortable, it was getting close to impossible to work. I use egg tempera, a water based medium. It was so hot in the workroom by noon, the paint was drying on the brush. The egg tempera literally uses raw egg yolk mixed with water and vinegar, which you then mix with pigments to make paint. This is not the most stable of mediums and I’ve discovered that very high temperatures can make the medium separate in the bottle, turning into an irremediable soup of water and congealed scrambled egg.

Projects still on the very slow go: Hilda of Whitby, a commission on paper for a friend

Even if you can get the medium stabilised (I started floating the little squeezy bottle in a cup of water to keep it cool) the paint itself starts to “cure” - interacting with oxygen to form chain polymers, making the paint permanent - right on the palette, leaving it impossible to use. When it starts to cure there’s no choice, you have to throw it out and start again. I was getting about a two or three hour window every day when there was enough light to see to paint but it still wasn’t so hot that it cooked the medium. 

I managed, through sheer dogged daily plodding, to get to the end of a couple of pieces:

St. Michael the Archangel, (after Guariento d’Arpo, c.1357) Egg tempera and 24k gold leaf on acid free watercolour paper. This painting is still available to buy. See more details here.

The Machine

So, given all the difficulties that have heaped up this year, and the pressing need to get some work done, I finally caved and talked to my landlord about our options, and to my surprise he just straight up suggested getting air conditioning.

And when I objected that we shouldn’t go to the extreme of knocking holes in the walls, Massimo said just the nicest thing I think any landlord has ever said to me: “Il foro è una cosa minima non ti preoccupare l'essenziale è che tu stia bene e riesci a produrre le tue meravigliose opere d'arte.”

“The hole is a minimal thing don't worry. The main thing is that you are well and can produce your wonderful works of art.”

A couple of days after I’d measured windows and the dimensions of the workroom, Massimo arrives in triumph with an enormous box:

Apparently in our astonishing times, you can just order things like this on the innerwebz.

He also made the savvy suggestion of getting some of that newfangled space-age sun shield plastic film you attach to the windows. This magical stuff blocks much of the solar radiation - UV and infra-red and heat - that comes through your windows. So I spent most of the day on Monday doing this:

I put the film on the outside set so when they’re closed it reduces the glare and the “work” the blinds have to do, and in turn lets the AC unit do less to cool the room.

Not quite the most professional job ever, but it works.

And I’m amazed how well it works, especially when you’ve got all three factors of film, blinds and Machine going at once. Even using only the film has improved things. I had the inner windows open, with the tinted ones shut, and the blinds all the way up - thus allowing some daylight into the workroom, with The Machine on low, and the room was still quite habitable at 3pm.

On an extreme heat day like today, (at 5pm 102F; we have been peaking about 6:30pm) the whole house is noticeably cooler. Fearing electricity bills, we’re using The Machine pretty sparingly. I’ve been closing the windows and turning it on about ten or eleven am, and this keeps the workroom very nice until a more normal quitting time of about 3pm. This has extended the work day - in the hottest part of the year in a record-breaking hot-year - from two hours to six.

Apparently the Italian gov’t also gives you some kind of tax break or compensation if you improve the energy-efficiency of your house. So it’s a win all around.

Though now, of course, I’m more or less obliged to live here for the rest of my life. It’s an English thing. As Bertie Wooster says every time he gets accidentally engaged, “One has to be civil.”

Getting AC feels a little like a moral failure, an admission of defeat and weak character - they’re going to revoke my Stoic Luddite card. But I really just needed to be able to work.

---

~

Thanks for reading to the bottom. I hope you’re having a happy and relaxing summer. If you would like to support my work researching and recreating classical Christian sacred art in traditional techniques, subscribe to my Ko-Fi page, Hilary White; Sacred Art. I am always grateful for donations to keep the lights on. And feel free to drop a comment in the box. Let’s talk.

~