It's not time to put away your costumes and fans yet. But something changed in the Italian summer. After weeks dominated by continuous heat, today the country looks like a patchy weather map: sun and clear spells on one side, sudden thunderstorms on the other, temperatures more bearable but not yet really cool.
The novelty is not so much the rain, but the movement. The subtropical anticyclone, which had kept the atmosphere still over Italy for days, began to give way. The more unstable air that entered from the North crossed the northern and central regions yesterday and today is moving towards the South. It is as if the bad weather was descending along the Peninsula, leaving clear weather behind but finding, proceeding south, an atmosphere that is still warm and full of humidity.
During the night the change was felt especially between Campania and Calabria. Locally intense thunderstorms formed in the lower Tyrrhenian Sea, accompanied by gusts of wind and accumulations of rain exceeding 30 millimeters in some locations. In Calabria the weather has already become a real problem: this morning train traffic was suspended between Vibo Marina and Briatico and slowed down between Amantea and Campora, according to updates from the Italian Railway Network.
Yellow alert
The Civil Protection has issued a yellow warning for thunderstorms for today in seven regions: Abruzzo, Basilicata, Calabria, Campania, Molise, Puglia and Sicily. In Calabria and Sicily there are also hydrogeological critical issues. It doesn't mean it will rain continuously everywhere. It means, rather, that very localized and rapid phenomena could develop: one country under the sun and the next one under a storm.
This is the real meteorological figure of the day. Not an orderly disturbance, capable of covering the sky for twenty-four hours, but a succession of episodes. In the North, sunny spells prevail, with some possible afternoon thunderstorms in the mountains. In the Center the sun alternates with showers especially along the Apennines and in the internal areas. In the South, however, instability remains more widespread: Campania, Puglia, Basilicata, Calabria and Sicily are the areas where the umbrella could be needed without much warning. The evening should bring improvement almost everywhere.
The cities monitored
Even the heat changes scale. After the almost generalized alert of recent weeks, today twenty of the twenty-seven cities monitored by the Ministry of Health are marked with the green dot. Only Ancona, Bari, Frosinone, Genoa, Latina, Rieti and Rome remain in yellow. It is a clear truce, but not yet a seasonal reversal: according to the "National Surveillance Bulletin" maximum temperatures remain high in the central-western Po Valley, in the internal areas of Tuscany and Lazio, in Sicily and in the eastern and southern sectors of Sardinia.
In short, autumn is not coming: the monopoly on heat ends, at least temporarily. And the transition is not painless. All the energy accumulated in recent weeks — warm air, humidity, overheated sea surfaces — becomes fuel when it encounters cooler currents. For this reason, summer rain increasingly does not arrive gradually, but in the form of violent thunderstorms, hail and gusts.
Today is therefore a day of hinges. Italy is breathing a little better, but is entering a more mobile and less predictable phase. On Wednesday the heat may already recover ground; A new, more organized disturbance is expected from Thursday, especially in the North and in the Tyrrhenian regions.
