Italy witnessed the hottest day of the current heatwave on Friday with red extreme heat warnings in 16 cities across the country, as firefighters battled wildfires.
Milan is expected to be the worst hit with temperatures rising to 40 degrees Celsius (104 Fahrenheit) while Bologna in the south and the capital city Rome is predicted to hit 39 degrees, according to official government estimates.
Other big cities being monitored for red heatwave alerts for Friday and Saturday by the Italian health ministry include Genoa, Florence, Turin, and Verona.
Pavia, located south of Milan, broke the record on Thursday with temperatures hitting 39.6 degrees.
The country’s temperatures have stood at least two to three degrees above the seasonal average, and the trend is expected to last till early August, according to the national weather website ilmeteo.com.
Hundreds of fires across Italy have accompanied the heat in recent weeks. The largest of such fires still burning Friday was in central Tuscany, where at least 860 hectares had been burned down since Monday in the area west of Lucca. This prompted the evacuation of over 1,000 people on Thursday.
Investigation over the cause of the fire has however been opened by prosecutors.
Italy’s national firefighting agency says they have intervened in at least 32,921 wildfires from the period of June 15 to July 21, 4,040 more than the same period last year. Most of the fires broke out in southern regions of Sicily, Calabria, Puglia, Lazio, and Rome.
The damage so far still falls short in comparison to that of Spain, where 199,651 hectares have burned, or in Romania with reportedly 149,324 hectares burned. Portugal has also witnessed the burning of 48,106 hectares, and France, 39,904.
ilmeteo.it predicts that Italy is about to peak at the maximum power of the African high-pressure zone “Apocalypse 4800”.
