Honestly, there is nothing nice about today’s word, calura (cah-loo-rah). Calura is more than  simple heat, it’s unbearable heat. It’s what  you get when it’s so hot you could bake cookies on the ground or fry your morning eggs on a car’s dashboard. 

It comes from the vulgar Latin word calura,  child of the verb  calere, being hot. In Italian, we started using it in the 13th century, so it’s likely our Dante complained about the heat using this very word. It has  the same root as caldo, hot, and  calore, heat: they are all lexical siblings.