Little did we know then, it would never cool down.
Coming on the heels of Europe’s second-hottest May on record, an extreme heat wave settled over the continent on June 18, 2026 — the first day of our trip — and lasted through Sunday, June 29 — the day we returned home. This would, on its face, seem to be a case of abysmal luck. But as someone who writes about extreme heat, it felt more like the moment I went from covering the story to living it myself, a jarring but not uncommon experience among my professional colleagues. As is often the case on the climate beat, it is only a matter of time before we become the subjects of our own stories.
To be sure, I’ve been hot in Europe before. Last year, I was also in Bologna during a heat wave, when the city set a record for the highest minimum temperature in June. At that time, I was pregnant and attending the Il Cinema Ritrovato film festival with my husband, a movie critic. Despite the wimpy European AC running in the theaters — and the nonexistent AC in many of the city’s best restaurants — we had such a good time that we pledged to make our attendance an annual family tradition. Next year, we decided then, we’d return with the baby.
Ah, the naïveté of parents to-be!
Our itinerary took us from Seattle to Paris for a one-night stopover before we would carry on to Bologna. On our arrival day, June 18, Paris hit 97 degrees Fahrenheit. Determined to try to see as much of the new-to-us city as we could, we stuck the baby in a backpack and raced from our air-conditioned room to another AC oasis, the Musée d’Orsay — a walk of about half an hour that took us along the sun-blasted east end of the Tuileries and over the exposed Pont Royal. By the time we reached the long line of wilting tourists waiting to enter the museum, our daughter had slumped, lethargic, in her carrier. Beside ourselves with panic, we pushed our way into the museum’s lightly air-conditioned ticketing office. I was calculating the fastest way to get medical help — yell for security and hope the museum had paramedics on hand? Dial the local emergency number? — when, after what felt like a terrifyingly long time, she opened her eyes and cried.
I’ve replayed that walk over and over in my head, wondering where we went wrong. Unfortunately, it is difficult to get good medical information about babies and heat. Infants’ warning signs are contradictory — sweat is a red flag, but so is not sweating; increased irritability should be watched for, but so should lethargy — and an individual’s acclimation and compounding conditions like hydration and airflow make it even harder to know when a temperature is safe, or isn’t. Did the sweltering ride into the city on an overcrowded RER mean our daughter was already under heat stress when we left again for our walk? Was it just jet lag compounding her lethargy? Was it the heat transfer from being in a carrier that was at fault, or all that direct sun on the Seine?
Whatever the cause, we arrived in Bologna on edge. In addition to our daughter, I was worried about the other most vulnerable member of our small party: my dad, a senior, who joined us a few days later. Having reported on the 2021 Pacific Northwest heat dome deaths and knowing the cardiac stressor of dehydration, especially on older adults, I was extra obnoxious about making sure everyone carried a water bottle and ensured that the apartment we rented (which I’d made extra sure came with air conditioning) stayed at an “American-style” temperature of “wrap yourself in a blanket indoors.” (I admit to having the weak American mind disease when it comes to using AC, although I was fascinated by the story a Belgian friend told about the social stigma against installing AC in his country because it’s perceived as making the conditions hotter for one’s neighbors.)
Still, meals out couldn’t be avoided, and while many restaurants seemed to have added air conditioning since our trip last year, Bologna is still an eat-on-the-street kind of city. Breakfast was tolerable; leaving for lunch and dinner, though, felt like having a tennis racket of heat swung directly at your face as soon as you stepped outside. The city’s famous porticoes, a “historical form of climactic refuge” designed to provide passive cooling in the form of shade and airflow, offered marginal relief. But even the clever medieval architecture couldn’t compete with the fossil fuel emissions-worsened heat; after the sun went down around 9 p.m., the heat would linger, radiating out of the masonry. The thermometer I hung from the stroller frequently read over 90 degrees Fahrenheit even as late as 11 p.m. To keep the baby cool, we tucked ice packs wrapped in burp cloths alongside her in the stroller, misted her with fans, and covered her legs in a Frogg Toggs evaporative cooling towel that we’d rewet in the city’s public water fountains.
During our 10 days in Italy, the daytime high never dropped below 95 degrees, and my dad and the baby spent almost their entire vacation indoors — either at the apartment or at the wonderful Biblioteca Salaborsa, a library and one of Bologna’s community cooling centers. It was from my colleague Robinson Meyer that I later learned more than half of Italian households now have air conditioning, although adoption has grown faster in the south than in the north, where we were. That’s a pattern that extends across Europe; about “28% of French homes and 13% of apartments have some kind of air conditioning,” Rob further writes.
But while excess mortality takes a long time to calculate accurately, France already reports that more than 1,300 people have died due to the heat since June 21, 2026. Most of the casualties are among people over the age of 65, as is usually the case during heat waves, but small children are also among the dead.
There isn’t a tidy ending to this story. We were hot, we lived, and we went home. I have almost no pictures of my child on her first international vacation because she spent practically all of it indoors, but that is hardly a tragedy. And — as I kept reminding myself when my intrusive thoughts and mom guilt became overwhelming — there are millions of parents raising millions of children in parts of the world that are very, very hot. What we accomplished, while inconvenient, was nothing extraordinary; in the coming years, it will probably become even more banal. (Indeed, it was about 10 degrees hotter in parts of France during this heat wave than anything we endured in Bologna.)
But let’s go back to that excess mortality number for just a moment. In 2022, a summer likely to be cooler than the six-day-old El Niño-fueled one now beginning in Europe, the World Health Organization calculated that more than 61,000 people died on the continent due to extreme heat stress. That’s 61,000 people with daughters and sons who also harangued them about remembering to drink water or stay out of the sun; 61,000 people who now won’t see their grandchildren start school, who won’t attend another family meal, who won’t take another vacation. While I spent 10 days worrying about how to keep the people I care about safe from extreme heat, it’s all but certain someone else — many someone elses — lost the ones they love in those same temperatures.
On the night before our departure for Paris, when our whole weather app had filled up with 97, 98, and 101 degree days stretching into the foreseeable future, my husband and I asked each other if we still wanted to go and be in that kind of heat. What a privilege it is, for now, to have been able to decide.
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