Some Like It Cold. The Life, Death and Miracles of Ice

Just like the infamous hornet from the motivational memes – which, according to the laws of physics, has wings too small to fly but is unaware of this and flies all the same – so too should ice not travel. And yet it certainly does. It forms on the winter peaks, and that is where it ought to melt. Yet even in Nero’s time, messengers were sent to gather snow from the Apennines; it was mixed with honey and fruit and served at the table before it melted away. And even then, Seneca railed against this whim of the wealthy: people, he wrote indignantly, who did not merely sip the snow but chewed it, flinging shards of ice into their glasses. In Rome, snow was stored in deep pits; it was used to chill drinks and treat fevers. In Persia, yakhchals were built – mud domes that retained the cold until the height of summer. In China, during the Zhou dynasty, there was even a dedicated administrative body: eighty ‘ice men’ who, every December, would cut blocks from the rivers and stow them in underground icehouses. Only the court was entitled to this, and the emperor would bestow ice cubes upon the highest-ranking officials as a mark of honour. Coolness in summer was a perishable luxury, an almost divine privilege. Those who did not live in the cold – or rule an empire – had to do without it.

Far from being dead material, behind its apparent inertia lies a history of commercial conquests, domestic revolutions and contemporary obsessions. Before anyone made money from it, ice cost nothing but hard labour. On Ischia, at the foot of Mount Epomeo, the snow gatherers collected the snow that had fallen in the woods of La Falanga. Enrico Camanni recounts in his "Il grande libro del ghiaccio" (Laterza, 2020) that after a snowfall, a crier would blow a conch shell to summon the men. They would climb up with shovels and baskets, pack the snow into pits, and cover it with chestnut leaves and earth. These pits were called ‘neviere’, and their contents would last until summer, when the ice was carried down to the valley – on the backs of mules and to the cry of ‘’a neve, ’u nevaiuolo!’. In the Alps, the work was far worse. The ice-cutters on the Galambra glacier, in the upper Susa Valley, set off at midnight and climbed for five hours in the dark with their sledge on their shoulders, a 2,000-metre ascent, to reach the glacier. There, they chipped away at enormous blocks with axes and iron wedges. Then came the descent. “On the ascent, gravity works against you; you sweat and curse, but the descent is far worse. The descent is brutal because you have to brake like mad, and the sledge is heaving with ice – at least three quintals. The ropes groan and sometimes snap, just like the tendons of the brakemen,” writes Camanni. The pass from which they hauled down that load is still called, in the Piedmontese dialect, ‘Pas dla giasa’, the ice pass. Down in the valley, the ‘harvest’ ended up in Turin’s icehouses – underground pits dug near the markets and taverns, lined with straw and wood shavings to keep the temperature below zero even in summer. From there, the ice was distributed to fishmongers, chemists, the city’s first hospitals and, for the portion destined for export, to the Ligurian ports. A portion of that Alpine cold, packed up, is said to have reached as far as Massawa, on the Red Sea, to cool the Italian colonies.

Whilst in Europe the cold was being carried on people’s shoulders, a young man from Boston was already shipping it out to sea. In 1806, Frederic Tudor was twenty-three years old and had no desire to study at Harvard like the rest of his family. A youthful trip to the Caribbean had left him with a fixed image in his mind: the stifling heat of the tropics and nothing to alleviate it. So he decided to load the ice harvested from the pond on his father’s farm onto a brigantine and send it to Martinique. In Boston, that solid water was worth nothing; in winter, all the lakes froze over and no one claimed them. But in the Caribbean, it could turn into a treasure. The shipowners mocked him; no one wanted a cargo destined to melt in the hold, and he had to buy the ship himself. The first voyage was a disaster. The real problem, more than the transport itself, was that people simply didn’t want ice. It took Tudor years to build up demand, one sip at a time. He gave ice away to barmen so they would serve cold drinks, confident that customers accustomed to an ice-cold glass would never go back to lukewarm. He discovered that sawdust – a free by-product of sawmills – insulated the blocks better than anything else. He bribed port authorities to secure a monopoly, and even ended up in prison for debt. He was released and set off again. In Cuba, where bar owners in Havana were eager to serve ice-cold drinks, he finally found a receptive market. In the 1830s, he made the leap that would make him a legend: from Boston to Calcutta, sixteen thousand miles and four months at sea across the equator. That a block of ice from New England would arrive ‘intact’ on the Ganges seemed impossible, yet it did. In fifteen years, the shipments to India alone earned Tudor – crowned the ‘Ice King’ – over two hundred thousand dollars, the equivalent of several million today. By the middle of the century, ice had become one of America’s major industries. Even Henry David Thoreau, the philosopher who was living in a cabin on the shores of Walden Pond in Massachusetts during those very years, saw Tudor’s men cutting ice from the lake to ship it to India. He drew a cosmic image from this in Walden, or Life in the Woods: the water of his little pond would mingle ‘with the sacred waters of the Ganges’.

Someone attempted to halt that revenue model. In 1851, a Florida physician, John Gorrie, patented the first ice-making machine: he had devised it to cool the rooms of yellow fever patients – to be perfectly honest – and not to profit. But for the natural ice industry, it was a gun to the head. If anyone could produce ice anywhere, what was the point of paying a high price to have it shipped from the North? A relentless press campaign was launched against the invention: natural ice was purer, healthier, the work of ‘Almighty God’, whilst artificial ice left residues, made people ill, and was almost a mechanical blasphemy. The very same rhetoric we hear today – ‘natural’ versus ‘chemical’ – had been tried and tested a century and a half ago. Gorrie always suspected that Tudor himself was pulling the strings. He was left without financial backers and died in 1855, poor and discredited. The irony came later: it was discovered that germs were, if anything, lurking in natural ice, cut from polluted waters. The war was won, however, by artificial cold. In 1914, in the United States, the production of mechanical ice surpassed that of natural ice, twenty-six million tonnes versus twenty-four. By the 1930s, with domestic refrigerators now in homes, the trade in blocks cut from lakes was already a thing of the past. The refrigerator was the quietest revolution of the century. Its arrival in kitchens transformed shopping habits and diets, freed up time for household chores and made metropolises in hot climates possible – cities which, without the cold chain, would never have reached their present size. It was also an Italian industrial achievement: for decades, ‘white goods’ – fridges, washing machines, freezers – were a source of pride for the country’s manufacturing sector, with brands such as Indesit and Zanussi making Italy a powerhouse in the household appliance industry. That era is now faltering. Beko, the Turkish giant that took over the former Whirlpool factories – the successors to Indesit – has announced redundancies. The Siena factory, which manufactures freezers, is ceasing production and awaiting reindustrialisation. It is the refrigeration sector that is giving way first, crushed by falling demand and Asian competition. Domestic refrigeration, which a century ago made ice a matter of course, is no longer enough to keep its manufacturers afloat.

If the Tudor empire was born of stubbornness, the ice lolly – which would go on to become a multi-billion market and the most nostalgic item of every childhood – was born of a moment of distraction. In 1905, in San Francisco, an eleven-year-old boy named Frank Epperson left a glass of soft drink on a windowsill with a stirring stick still in it. It was a freezing night. By morning, the drink had frozen solid around the stick. Eighteen years later, he patented the idea and called it the Popsicle. After all, even the quintessential cold treat, ice cream, originates from ice rather than milk. Sorbet arrived in Sicily with the Arabs, who brought the word – sharbat, meaning ‘cool drink’ – and a little secret: by mixing salt with snow, the snow melts and absorbs heat, causing the temperature to drop well below zero. The container holding the sweet liquid, immersed in that frozen slush, cools until it freezes. That very same technique – ice scraped by hand from a block – has survived to this day in Rome’s ‘grattachecca’. Before the kiosks along the Lungotevere, which appeared in the early 20th century, the ‘grattacheccaro’ was the last popular, urban heir to that natural ice supply chain: his forebears would travel down to Rome from the villages on the slopes of Mount Sirente, carrying the blocks down on donkeys’ backs, covered in straw. The ice is scraped, piled into the glass, and only then are the syrup and fruit added: this is where it differs from granita, where everything is already frozen together. In grattachecca, the cold remains in its purest form, and you can feel it crunching between your teeth. It was Sicilian pastry chefs who perfected the recipe, and it is also to a Sicilian that we owe its European success: Francesco Procopio Cutò, who opened the Café Procope in Paris in 1686 and introduced the French to granita and sorbets. Legend has it that, before him, it was Caterina de’ Medici who, upon marrying Henri d’Orléans in 1533, brought the Florentine ‘sweet ice’ chefs across the Alps – a story that historians are unable to substantiate, but which Italians love to repeat whenever the French lay claim to the invention of ice cream. It is a dispute that has never been settled, because gelato has become a symbol of identity, and no one wants to concede its origins. When tucking into a cone, one forgets this: that sun-kissed treat, now a symbol of the Mediterranean summer, was for centuries a child of the mountains and winter. The ice-cream makers from the Dolomites, who in the late nineteenth century swarmed with their carts as far as Vienna and Germany, then on to Czechoslovakia and Poland, did not come from the heat as their customers believed: they were people of the snow, who came down in summer to sell the cold and returned home to the Alps in winter.

Ice is also an archive. The bubbles trapped within ice cores record the atmospheres of forgotten eras: volcanic ash, lead in petrol, traces of nuclear explosions. Therein lies the evidence that carbon dioxide, which had remained within a certain range for hundreds of thousands of years, shot past all previous highs with the Industrial Revolution. Ice throws the consequences of humanity’s past actions right in our faces. And it is as it melts that it becomes, one last time, a stake in the game. Greenland was a distant, unchanging place, of ice, fjords and scattered communities. Global warming has thrust it into the centre of the world. As it retreats, the ice sheet does not merely release water: it exposes rare earths, uranium and hydrocarbons, and opens up sea routes that bring the planet closer together. As the ice vanishes, it reveals the land it once covered. And some would even like to put it up for sale. At the NATO summit in Ankara in early July, Donald Trump revived the idea of buying the island. Danish Prime Minister Frederiksen replied that “Greenland, of course, is not for sale”, whilst the Greenlandic Prime Minister spoke of sovereignty as a red line that must not be crossed. Meanwhile, the wife of an adviser to the US president posted a map of the island draped in the Stars and Stripes, with a single word: ‘Soon’ – a social media version of the ‘for sale’ sign planted on an iceberg. For decades, the Arctic had lived by the motto ‘High North, Low Tension’: a peace made possible by one thing alone – the ice – which kept everyone at a distance. As long as the ice remained, there was nothing to fight over. As it melted, it swept away both the barrier and the truce.

And so the circle closes and turns on its head. The ice that Tudor used to bring as a marvel to the wealthy of Calcutta is now free in every freezer, just as the ice cube has once again become a cult object. In cocktail bars, ‘clear ice’ is crafted – blocks as transparent as glass, without the white veins of trapped air – which barmen carve into spheres and cubes and engrave by hand with the hot tip of an iron: the venue’s logo, initials. A process that can take up to forty-eight hours of controlled freezing before the ice even reaches the glass, and which adds just as much to the bill as the spirit poured over it. The snow that emperors once sent people to fetch from the mountains has once again become a luxury. At the other end of the spectrum are the bags from supermarkets or ‘Bangla’ convenience shops open late into the night: two kilos of cloudy, air-filled ice cubes, bought at the last minute to top up the spritz for the aperitif.

The ice wasn’t meant to travel, yet it has circumnavigated the globe only to return to where it started: a privilege, once again. The difference is that this time, it is not the travelling ice that is in short supply, but what remains.