The intense heatwave that has gripped Italy for over a week and has been linked to a number of deaths is set to continue unabated on Wednesday with the number of major Italian cities on red alert going up from 17 to 18.
When the health ministry puts a city on red alert it means the heat is so intense it is a threat to healthy people and not just vulnerable groups such as the sick and the elderly.
The cities on red alert on Wednesday are Ancona, Bologna, Bolzano, Brescia, Campobasso, Florence, Frosinone, Genoa, Latina, Milan, Palermo, Perugia, Rieti, Rome, Turin, Trieste, Verona and Viterbo.
A 70-year-old truck driver was found dead in his lorry parked in a lay-by on the A4 highway early on Wednesday and the hypothesis that he had a bad turn due to the heat has not been ruled out.
A 53-year-old woman with a heart condition collapsed and died in severe heat in Palermo on Tuesday.
A man died in extreme heat working on a construction site near Bologna on Monday and a 70-year-old man drowned in flash floods caused by torrential rain following a bout of extreme weather in Bardonecchia near Turin, also on Monday.
Trips to emergency rooms have risen up to 20% cross Italy amid the severe heatwave, the president of the Italian society of urgent and emergency medicine (SIMEU), Alessandro Riccardi, told ANSA Tuesday.
The Coldiretti farm group, meanwhile, called for special measures to protect the estimated half a million farm workers picking crops in the summer heat.
An anti-heat protocol to keep workers safe in the ongoing heatwave is set to be signed at the labour ministry Wednesday, sources said.
There were heat-linked blackouts in Florence, Bergamo and the Milan area Tuesday, due to the surge in the use of AC units and fans knocking out power lines, as well as overheating power cables.
Italy has suffered a series of devastating and frequently deadly extreme weather events in recent years and is especially exposed to the climate crisis.
Extreme weather events linked to the climate crisis caused over 765,000 deaths worldwide between 1993 to 2022, including around 38,000 deaths in Italy, Germanwatch said in its ‘Climate Risk Index 2025’ report in February.
The development, environment and human rights organization said Italy was the fifth-worst-affected country by these climate events in the period in question after Dominica, China, Honduras and Myanmar.
Scientists say the climate crisis caused by human greenhouse gas emissions is making extreme weather events such as heatwaves, droughts, supercharged storms and flooding more frequent and more intense.
Although there are many sources of the greenhouse gases that are causing global heating, the main driver is the burning of fossil fuels such as oil, gas and coal, sales of which generate huge profits for the world’s energy giants.