Our Winter Weather (so far…)

It’s an odd sort of winter here in Bagni di Lucca. One of the glories of an Italian winter is the many days of blue sky and crisp air with ample snow to clothe its mountains providing excellent ski slopes. Instead, this winter has seen more overcast days than even London and an inordinate amount of rain. On the plus side temperatures have always been above freezing and only one morning have I found our water butt frozen over.

Recently, however, there has been a really cold spell and the mountains have received more ample mantles of snow. In particular, the Prato Fiorito, the whale-back mountain dominating our Val di Lima, has turned white for the first time this year.

Actually, if people imagine sunny Tuscany and rainy London their perception is quite wrong. London, for example, receives an average of twenty two inches of rainfall per annum but Lucca receives over thirty five inches!

So why do people escape to Tuscany for the climate, one might ask? It’s not to do with rainfall: it’s to do with hours of sunshine. London, my birthplace, because of its particular geographic position on an east flowing river estuary (the Thames), suffers from an unduly large number of overcast days. You can verify this fact and seek a further explanation by reading Stephen Liddell’s excellent post at https://stephenliddell.co.uk/2018/01/27/busting-the-myth-of-london-being-a-rainy-city/). Two-thirds of the year London is either overcast or cloudy. It’s quite the opposite in our part of the world with two thirds of the year displaying cloudless or virtually cloudless days,

The other factor to consider is that in London most of the rain falls in summer whereas here it falls in winter. Also one must consider the intensity of rainfall. When it rains in London there is rarely massive precipitation, just a gloomy half-hearted drip.  (I can remember very few occasions when, for example, there were flood alerts on the North Circular road). When it rains here it can truly pour and more – whole hills collapse, landslides cause massive destruction and loss of life and the area round the walls of Lucca gets regularly flooded.

I’ve described this phenomenon, known as ‘water-bombing’, in the following posts:

https://longoio2.wordpress.com/2014/11/14/water-water-everywhere/

https://longoio.wordpress.com/2013/10/22/water-bombs/

Anyway, we’ve been advised not to remove the protective sheets from our lemon plants yet, although planting pansies seems to be ok.

I wonder what else winter has in store for us. Spring equinox roll on!

(Photo courtesy Aldo Lanini: Monte Rondinaio, right, and Monte Altareto, left, from Pieve di Monti di Villa)