We conclude (not astronomically or meteorologically, but in the work calendar) this summer of 2025, which, from my point of view, has been a strange summer. A summer ofheat waves and waves of fires, with the typical news snakes of the time, but mostly negative and with endless and very bitter controversies.
The summer of 2025 has left me with some disturbing or downright depressing feelings. The culmination of this unease I experienced a couple of days before the Virgin of August, in the Alsatian city of Colmar. Immersed in the heat wave that was suffocating all of Europe, we had resigned ourselves to sacrificing the hottest hours and spending them locked in the hotel with the air conditioning. Around 7:30 in the evening, we plucked up our courage and went out for a walk.
Colmar—which is a very touristy city—greeted us with an offensive sandwich of hot air and empty streets. We walked reluctantly toward the center, full of restaurants, terraces and desolation. That night the terraces were empty, and there were only disgusted waiters, boasting with the menu to catch their breath. We walked listlessly, bewildered by the fact that it was getting dark and the temperature hadn't dropped even a degree. The few people we passed on the street moved forward with the same heaviness, slowly but eager to get home or to the hotel, in silence, without joy. It didn't seem like summer: it seemed like a scene from Black Mirror.
These heat waves that we apparently won't be able to avoid from now on have swallowed up the summers we knew. We don't feel like going for walks, or playing outdoor games, or sitting on a terrace for long periods of time, or visiting unknown places, or enjoying food.
I remembered a article I published in this newspaper in the summer of 2016I wrote it with answers from family and friends to the question "What is summer?" Don't read it if you're very sensitive and prone to melancholy. I have the feeling that, to a large extent, we've lost the summer we knew. For days now, the only thing that comes to mind is that Green Day song, Wake me up when September ends.
To avoid leaving with a bad taste in your mouth, I'll leave you here with some summer thoughts that I rediscovered while searching for this old article. Henry James wrote: "Summer afternoon, summer afternoon; they've always seemed to me the most beautiful words in the English language." Afternoon, afternoon, evening, header. They seem like beautiful words to me too, but they're even more so when you can add this "al fresco" that is so typical of us. And when you can say them in your own language without anyone looking at you with strangeness, hostility, or contempt, of course. terrace to have that vermouth or pre-dinner beer: these deeply rooted customs will eventually disappear, because our restaurateurs are making an effort to adapt to the time zones of tourists, and at twelve thirty in the afternoon the tables are already reserved for them. months of July and August, we say. But then we'll have to live in the city. How will we withstand one heat wave after another, in the city?
