Civil protection volunteers delivering water and fresh produce to elderly people on August 13, 2021 in Lecce, Italy. A heat wave carried by the anticyclone named “Lucifer” hit Italy, and in particular the south of the country, where a record-breaking temperature of 48.8 degrees was registered in Sicily.
Its olive trees ravaged by the Xylella pandemic and its fields parched by drought, Salento is literally a tinderbox. Small fires break out all the time, and where once you would have seen crowds of people working frantically to save their family’s trees, today you see absolutely nothing, as trunks that stood for centuries burn and crumble into ashes, and nobody cares.
View this post on Instagram A post shared by János Chialá (@janosino) The owner of this field signed a contract with a firm, which also operates the largest olive oil mill in the area, to have all of his trees eradicated, ground into chipped wood and shipped to a biomass power plant in Calabria, some 500 km away, a sorry ending for these majestic trees that used to be the pride of the region.
As summer comes to Puglia, in South Italy, increasing numbers of dead locusts can be found in the countryside. Gigantic swarms of these insects are currently wrecking havoc from East Africa to India and even Sardinia in what is quickly becoming a global crisis, and in the midst of a serious drought, the main trigger for this pest, farmers in the Mediterranean region are getting nervous.
At Il Fico Rosso, Cisternino.