Once upon a time, there was Ferragosto desert. If you found yourself in any Italian city on August 15, you would have thought the apocalypse had come: deserted streets, store shutters down, factories closed, not a soul in sight.

Ferragosto - a national holiday in Italy - was a day for gavettoni (water balloons) on the beach and for family grigliate (barbecues); most households had been at the beach since the beginning of August, and the day marked the height of summer, after which the ‘burrasca di Ferragosto,’ a low pressure area associated with a drop in temperatures, was likely to arrive to signal the end of summer was nearing and, with it, the return to work or to school (now, meteorologically speaking, summer begins on average two weeks earlier and ends two weeks later compared to the 1960s, with temperatures 2C higher on average).