This is us: high-end climate migrants

It’s not just about wildfires, ‘tropical nights’ and everyone’s obsession with the weather (when will the fourth wave hit? And the fifth? And the sixth? And the much-needed downpour?). No, this endless summer has brought other consequences.

It has also created, defined or brought to light a small but significant new social class: high-end climate migrants (hereinafter referred to as MCFA). Let’s leave Ceuta and the individuals with serious problems aside; yet there is a whole other section of the population which, faced with these temperatures – three months at thirty-five degrees – is radically changing its habits.

The MCFA is the 2.0, over-the-top version of the old “digital nomad”: in short, it’s us, itinerant professionals with no fixed abode, who can move about more or less as we please, provided there’s air conditioning and a good internet connection for our laptop, which we use to carry out work that will soon be replaced by AI (which will generate even more heat).

The endless summer, with its various El Niños, La Niñas, heatwaves and tropical nights, has devastated us and forced us out into the open. But now we exist, and you will have to reckon with us. The MCFA, in fact, is now a fixture in almost every Italian home, because the MCFA wanders aimlessly like a fairground operator. The MCFA actually did have a home of its own, and it wanted to stay there, as it always has. In the days of ‘normal’ Augusts, the MCFA would in fact stay shut away in its studio flat during the day and go out in the evening – for a walk, to the cinema. The city was beautiful and deserted. Now, however, if you go out in the evening, it’s just as hot as it is during the day, and there’s more traffic than when schools reopen. 1.7 million tourists in Rome over the mid-August bank holiday, according to the figures, and the cars of locals on holiday have been replaced by private hire vehicles and open-top coaches (and I would like to have a word with you, the tourist who comes to Rome in August to take a tour in an open-top coach at 39 degrees). 

Instead, it’s time to discuss tropical nights, the real coup de grâce for the MCFA: they’re not a Brazilian film festival, nor the name of an erectile dysfunction drug – no, it’s when eco-anxiety strikes even the most die-hard anti-vaxxer. It’s when the temperature difference between day and night disappears. With tropical nights and the surges, the MCFA is seriously rethinking his life: move to Dubai? It’s now just as warm there, but with no taxes and plenty of air conditioning. Get a house in the mountains, in a mountain pasture? Yes, but then, apart from the cases of reclusive and aloof poets, what would he write about? Even the case of the writer Cognetti was decisive and unsettling. For years he’d assured us that the mountains cured everything, that living on Monte Rosa was the remedy for all ills, especially those of the spirit; then, some time ago, he suffered a terrible breakdown whilst on compulsory psychiatric observation (TSO). 

Everyone is exploring solutions; tourism is being redefined: there’s the editorial friend who moves to a remote island in the former Yugoslavia every July. There’s the one who goes to Latvia to explore Riga’s brutalist architecture. Norway is the new Porto Cervo. It’s all about assessing fjords, exploring islets and planning Arctic trips. Perhaps next year to Putin’s Russia? What’s the food like in Donbass? Lapland. So many people have been to Lapland this summer. I wonder what Lapland is really like. 

Even the lack of second homes, which the MCFA had always treated with nonchalance, has now become a serious issue. This is partly because the family homes provided – if there are any at all – such as those belonging to parents in small villages on the plain or on the lower slopes, are no longer suitable as climatic refuges, as they lack what has now become a necessity: air conditioning in every room.  Even the cultural shift that took place years ago – installing split-system air-conditioners ‘in the bedrooms’ – was psychologically gruelling. Now, installing air-conditioning throughout the house will be no walk in the park.  It is not necessarily due to stinginess or laziness (the building work! The dust!) but rather to age-old prejudice (air conditioning as the devil’s tool, a capitalist luxury, and so on). But homes without air conditioning in every room are relics of the past; they will soon be archaeological curiosities; they represent family ties that are being severed.

In fact, the endless summer is also causing new social rifts. The MCFA may even end up arguing with a wealthy friend who says: “Ah, my dream is to stay in the city” (as if I’d believe that – you’ve got a 500-square-metre house full of terraces) – and here we have yet another class struggle (the MCFA, forced into a nomadic existence against their will, becomes envious and resentful).

In this line of work, it is possible that someone might take pity on you and invite you to the countryside, the seaside or the mountains. But whilst in normal summers this used to mean one, at most two weeks, now it is a matter of months. So even though the MCFA is extremely reclusive and aloof, he accepts everything, travels to the most absurd places, and befriends the sort of unsavoury characters he would never have associated with in his former life when temperatures were more bearable; he becomes the sort of freeloader who, once he’s settled into your home, never leaves.

He’s also become an expert on animals. Suddenly, that friend with the dog who doesn’t know who to entrust it to at his seaside holiday home (with Daikin air conditioning throughout) knows he can count on him. But be careful, because the MCFA can easily turn into a squatter – it won’t take long before they’ve changed the locks. Soon there’ll be a programme on Rete4, no longer about foreign squatters, but about the intellectual who’s moved into your beach house and won’t leave.

However, even being a guest can sometimes feel like a job. You are not free; you must follow other people’s pace, and you must ‘earn your keep’ – you must be pleasant, entertain, and make conversation, even at breakfast (making conversation at breakfast should be a universal offence – forget about surrogacy). Meanwhile, the MCFA might simply wish to relax in their underwear with a Peroni Familiare and allow the belches to flow.  

However, you must be kind to the MCFA; he is fighting a battle you cannot possibly know about. The MCFA, especially if he is elderly, would simply like to go on that famous holiday. To head off there at the start of summer and never move again. But the fact is that a holiday is obviously no longer within his means (I am not talking about air-conditioning throughout the house, but not even the first-generation De Longhi ‘Pinguino’). He lives on memories, on nostalgia (ah, those summers in the countryside at his grandmothers’ houses, three whole months, without a telephone, coming back and not even recognising your own parents; today they’d arrest you like the family in the woods). But the family estates have been lost, and so has his purchasing power. 

The MCFA never gives up: here it is, exploring remote corners of the country in search of fresh places to colonise. At one point, I went to check out a rather dreary hillside in Piedmont, nestled amongst the depopulated valleys of the textile district – but depopulation is a cause for anxiety. If areas are becoming depopulated, there must be a reason. What if you then hit a creative block? Well, proceed with the ambitious project: of course, let’s all go and live together with many friends in a depopulated village (it’s one of those ideas with the lowest chance of ever being realised; everyone has toyed with it at some point, but no one has ever actually done it. It’s the bridge over the Strait that lurks within each of us). Again, perhaps we should then ‘squat’ – when the MCFA goes on day trips, it spots abandoned, uninhabited or vacant houses and villas almost everywhere. Create a network of seaside ‘Spin Time’ retreats? ‘Pieds dans l’eau’? We don’t have the nerve.  

So what are we to do? Shut ourselves away in the cellar, as the poor people of Milan used to do, entrusting travellers at Linate with fake postcards from the Maldives? Because another of the disastrous consequences of this endless summer – perhaps the worst – is that it has turned us all into Milanese. That is to say, people desperate to flee the city as soon as the weekend or a long weekend rolls around, let alone the summer. Once upon a time, in Rome and elsewhere, you could move about freely even on public holidays, without necessarily feeling poor or unlucky. Now, nothing: you have to get away. Or shut yourself away in the cellar (with Wi-Fi). And there, watch the weather, day by day, hour by hour, like sailors, to work out the day when, at last, you’ll be able to go home.