Dry, Balmy Weather Has Italians Praying for Winter

For Italy, a winter that never came is proving to be a tourist’s joy, a farmer’s nightmare, a skier’s frustration and a national headache. Mother Nature is playing cruel tricks this year.

Rome basked in bright sunshine again Friday, as it has nearly every day for the past few months, although temperatures were down a little from the spring-like levels that had combined with dry and cloudless skies earlier in the week to lure loungers to the Spanish Steps and the Piazza Navonna.

There were few smiles, though, among Italian officials and weather experts.

Nationwide, a bad drought is getting worse. Much of northern Italy is hooded by smog so thick that it is closing airports, driving residents to don surgical masks and belatedly focusing national attention on a deteriorating environment.

In unseasonably warm waters off the Tuscany coast, a skin diver is dead, killed by a great white shark whose like is rarely seen so far north in the Mediterranean in winter.

Italians have begun to stare wistfully at newspaper and TV images of snow-shoveling Americans. There is almost no snow in the Alps. Resort operators are counting their losses in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

Already the drought is the worst in a decade, affecting nearly the entire Italian peninsula. In the northeast, and across the border in France, forest fires have been blazing through timberland that is normally covered by snow at this time of year.

In January alone, there were 446 fires, according to the Ministry of Agriculture. Fires of the sort normally seen only in the dry summer months destroyed about 10,000 acres of forest and grassland in the northern regions of Lombardy, Liguria, Emilia Romagna and Tuscany. Fires also burned in the Abruzzo south of Rome.

Only Negligible Rainfall

The island of Sardinia, where priests have been ordered by their bishops to pray for rain, has had only negligible rainfall in the past 11 months. In Florence, it has not rained for two months, according to Italian meteorologists. Water rationing began this week in Genoa; the washing of streets and cars and the watering of flowers is forbidden. Italian newspapers Wednesday carried pictures of Venetian gondolas aground in side canals where the water level had dropped.

In Rome, where rain falls principally in the winter, December and January brought 1.95 inches of rainfall. The 30-year average for those two months is 8.27 inches.

Anticipating major crop losses, the Italian government has asked the European Community for a million tons of corn, barley and oats for cattle feed.

Unseasonably warm, still air has brought record levels of pollution, and alarm, to the industrial area of Milan. As winter winds refused to blow, surgical masks began to appear in shop windows all over the city last week to counter pollution levels creeping toward the unbreathable level. Milan pollution eased over last weekend but rose sharply again Monday.

With the nation’s industrial heartland swimming glumly through foggy goo the color of yesterday’s dishwater, there came calls for action to clean up Italy’s environment. Italy has been one of Europe’s least ecology-conscious nations. Now, though, with both the Adriatic and the Mediterranean critically ill, the Alps becoming dirty and traffic slowly but surely choking all the major cities, Italy is being forced to take stock.

“We must move immediately to drastically lower pollution levels. If not, by the year 2000 Italy and the world will be a gas chamber,” warned Franco Reviglio, president of ENI, the Italian national energy conglomerate.

Environmentalists joined by Italy’s Ministry of Industry and the two-year-old Ministry for the Environment are calling for reforms that would include stricter pollution controls for automobiles and the introduction of unleaded gasoline, called “green gas.”

Weather Tied to Shark Attack

Italian newspapers link the extraordinarily warm winter with the presence of the great white shark in waters off the coast of Tuscany near the port of Piombino.

Luciano Costanzo, 47, an expert diver, was checking underwater electric cables last Friday when the shark came. Costanzo surfaced screaming “Shark!” but was immediately dragged back under, according to his son, Gianluca, 18, who witnessed the attack.

There have been only about 20 shark attacks in the Mediterranean in this century, according to Italian researchers.

A search by divers and boats towing underwater cameras recovered Costanzo’s oxygen cylinders with shark teeth marks, his flippers and his belt in about 75 feet of water. The search continues, but there has been no sign of the shark.