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FLORIDIA, Sicily – Prior to this week, the small Sicilian town of Floridia had several claims to fame. The second wife of a Bourbon king was the duchess of the town. Snails, a local delicacy, are grown here. The surrounding lands won the award for Italy’s greenest city in 2000. The mayor is among Italy’s youngest.

But now Florida is known for something else, something much more sinister. It is perhaps the hottest city in Europe’s recorded history, offering a preview of sweltering and hot weather across Italy and the entire Mediterranean. potentially uninhabitable future brought by the world’s changing climate.

“Floridia is now the center of the world when it comes to climate,” 24-year-old Mayor Marco Carianni said as he cools off in the city’s central square, a day after a nearby monitoring station recorded temperatures of 119.84 degrees Fahrenheit on Thursday. or about 49 degrees Celsius. “We beat Athens”

By Friday afternoon, that temperature dropped to 96 degrees. But days ago, unprecedented heat had turned Florida into a dazzlingly bright ghost town, its bars deserted, its baroque and sand-coloured churches darkened, its squares emptied.

The famous snails of the region burned in their shells in the surrounding fields. The merciless sun branded the limes with yellow spots and scalded their flesh inside. Everyone is confined to their homes. The air conditioner they blew caused power outages. The digital sign outside the local pharmacy showed an unofficial temperature of 51 Celsius, or about 124 Fahrenheit.

The suffocating heat wave made it difficult for the ancient city of Syracuse to access its satellite Floridia. It has swept the whole of Italy and the region for weeks. Wednesday was just the culmination, the latest event in a summer filled with unforgivable temperatures, heat-borne plagues.

Wildfires and unpredictable winds have burned the woodlands in the southern region of Calabria, laying claim to grasslands in Sicily and forests in Sardinia. Authorities evacuated residents of a small town near Rome after a forest fire broke out. Greece is still burning one of the biggest fires in decades. Most of Europe looks up at the sky in fear, wondering if the winds and weather will bring more stifling heat, hail or flooding.

But for now, it’s Floridia perched, albeit dangerously, on the cusp of Europe’s extreme weather events.

“We’ve never had heat like this – it’s new to us,” said 27-year-old Francesco Romano as they walked through the lemon and orange groves next to the area where the instruments recorded the record-breaking temperature. must be verified by international authorities. He didn’t need validation and was considering planting avocados and other exotic fruits instead of citrus to better withstand the heat. He cut open a lemon; The walls of their carpets had reached the consistency of crumbled dough.

“Look, it’s rotten,” he said. “Today is Wednesday.”

The fieldworkers leaned their wooden ladders against the lemon trees, gathered the good lemons into yellow baskets and discarded the bad ones.

Mario Pignato, 44, said: “It’s a terrible situation for everyone, the workers and the plants. The damage is terrible. We are not talking about a day or a few days, we are talking about months of heat and hot winds.”

Nearby, 49-year-old Giusy Pappalardo crunched in a field full of snail shells and retrieved the hollow and sun-baked corpses.

“Look, this is cooking inside,” he said as he stood black against the dried-up stream behind the orange trees singing by the fire. “The pinnacle of a day you can survive. But the thing is, there wasn’t even a day of relaxation.”

He said the lack of significant rainfall after spring and rising temperatures promising a simmering summer convinced him to significantly reduce the number of snails he grows this season. This saved him from a terrible financial blow, he said, because so many people he had raised in a network tunnel died.

The intense heat stopped the snails in their tracks as their feet burned to the ground. “They stop and they die,” he said. Others sought shade under the terracotta roof tiles he had put in the greenhouse, but they too died. It was doubtful that those who managed to get under the ground, where they often formed a wall to conserve their moisture, survived. “It burned underground,” he said.

Her niece, 23-year-old Viviana Pappalardo, who also works on the farm where they grow oranges and grapes, said she is worried about the future.

“People don’t realize that the damage is everywhere,” he said, hoping the extreme heat in his town and the fact that “people can feel it on their skin” will serve as a wake-up call.

All of us who work in this sector, in agriculture, understand this.” “And we are the foundation of everything. When you look at it broadly, Europe is dying.”

But that sense of urgency seemed to fade with the high temperature. On Thursday evening, Floridia’s youth returned with a beer at the local bar just down the road from one of Sicily’s best snail restaurants. They raced their scooters up and down the street and celebrated their birthdays. The debilitating heat of the previous day seemed like something else to talk about.

Still, some of them looked really scared.

“We suffered,” said 25-year-old Christian Pirruccio, who took a break from hanging out with his friends to talk about how he felt faint while smoking outside on Wednesday morning. She gave up on her plans to go to the gym and stayed at home with her mom and grandpa, who talked to her about how the fall rains came months ago. He said that between 10 pm and 4 am, the electricity was cut off. “I felt sick,” he said.

The young mayor went to court and checked in on the older residents, who, like most nights, donned their best clothes and jewels and gathered on metal benches that burned as hot as grills in the afternoon sun in the main square. Some still couldn’t understand how hot it was.

“I’ve never seen such heat,” said Nino Bascetta, 70, whose home was shut on Wednesday when three air conditioners exploded. He closed the windows, drew the curtains, closed the shutters, fearing that the heat would break the glass. “It was like hibernating.”

However, around 9 pm, his wife asked to see her friends because of the scorching heat in the city.

“I’m sick of being stuck inside,” said his wife, Angela Cannarella, 66, sitting next to him in a black and white striped dress.

They occurred for a standing appointment in what Mr. Bascetta called the “senior’s lounge”.

“Seemed like a good idea,” he said. “It wasn’t.”

A few minutes later, sweat dripped and they decided to get in the car and turn on the air conditioner.

Another group of friends sat around joking about how the town was more a part of North Africa than southern Europe.

Alessandro Genovese, parish priest of the town’s 18th-century baroque cathedral, unfastened his priest’s collar in the heat. With the decline of Italian television and global media, he said he wanted to seize all the attention in his town to “call” the United States and other major contributors to climate change to “call” to protect the world, which he calls God’s first step. present.

“We’re destroying Florida,” he said.