Let’s hold each other tighter tonight. Because the eclipse is the only quarter of an hour of cool relief we’ll get

When, on these nights, I lie awake because of the heat and, through my wide-open windows, I look at the other wide-open windows, behind which people like me, awake because of the heat, are looking at other wide-open windows; when, at eight in the morning, hoping for a breath of fresh air, I go down to do the shopping and see lots of people who have gone down early to do the shopping, hoping for a breath of fresh air, and we all notice that there are people about walking like zombies, yet those zombies look at us as if we were the zombies; when I notice that, as early as eight in the morning, there are people on the street who are a bit out of their minds – the sort you used to see only during the ‘controra’ – and I realise that the magical and unsettling ‘controra’ takes place from eight in the morning until eight in the evening; when you realise that everyone’s stayed in town, because where on earth are you going to go in this heat?; when all those who’ve stayed in town watch the others who’ve stayed in town at night and go out shopping during the day thinking: who on earth are these zombies? Well, in short, when you realise that all these people (zombies included) are glued to the weather forecast (which I thought only I watched), and it feels as though we’ve all gone back to the days of Covid, when during the press conference they’d give the death toll and we’d say to ourselves: ‘I wouldn’t go out even under torture’; when I learnt about apps that show which streets are in the shade and thought: ‘Are we all turning into idiots? Don’t you know where the shade falls?’ And then the very next day, whilst I was in Foggia at 2 pm, I downloaded the app just to walk two hundred metres without risking a sunburn on my head; when I realise, for the first time in over thirty years of my career, that I’m using a semicolon – a piece of punctuation I don’t understand (‘It’s a hermaphrodite that proves nothing, except that you went to university,’ as Kurt Vonnegut said), because I feel that this summer there’s no end in sight – it’s just a succession of heat and stifling humidity – so I think of that old, familiar saying: there are no longer any mid-seasons.

However, that is now a thing of the past. From now on, we will state: the ‘beautiful season’ no longer exists. The one from days gone by, when you would look forward to the Roman summer, and indeed the Neapolitan one too (I am not sure about Milan), to go out and enjoy the night – not too hot – with a Zephyr breeze that was not even this pleasant in the Odyssey. When you made friends, fell in love, started relationships, got married and planned a trip, then a family, because you were enchanted by the summer. Now, at best, you can only say it with an anguish that tears you in two: ‘Today’s low was 30 degrees.’ Actually, you don’t even say it yourself, but you hear it from the Senegalese or the Nigerian or the Ghanaian – someone close to the Equator who’s an expert on these matters and who tells you: ‘Today’s low was 30 degrees; it’s not nearly that hot in Africa.’ There’s no such thing as ‘the lovely season’ any more, and given the way things are going – the climate crisis (and indeed our difficulty in accepting our share of the blame) – I’d wager that from this summer onwards, ‘the lovely season’ will become a cliché, something we’ll joke about at the expense of those among us who once said ‘there are no more in-betweens’ and now say ‘there’s no such thing as the lovely season’ anymore. Then tonight, perhaps we’ll go out to watch the solar eclipse, hoping for a momentary cool spell. So, if it does happen, in those moments of darkness and sudden coolness, let us embrace each other and reflect on how we can collaborate to cool down the world and our cities, working together (each of us leveraging our own skills, without anyone falling prey to the presumption of knowing it all), innovating and hoping for a new ‘beautiful season’ of summer dreams – romantic and otherwise – of looking after ourselves and the environment. In short, what can I say: let’s put an end to this heat.