ROME: As the breeze swept in under the cafe’s parasols and the sky darkened over Rome, waiter Apu Haq exchanged commiserations with a customer nursing an espresso and a scowl. “They said summer was going to arrive this week,” remarked Haq, “and instead came winter.”

Within minutes, torrential rain was lashing the cobblestones as thunder rumbled in the distance. “It’s all the wrong way round,” said a bewildered Haq, from Bangladesh. “It’s incredible. I’ve been here for 10 years now and I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s too strange.”

Italian springs are often strange, but this one will perhaps be remembered as particularly capricious. As with much of northern Europe, the country has shivered its way through a good deal of the year. In the north-west, according to the Italian meteorological society, residents have had the coldest May since 1991. In much of the north-east, the spring has been the wettest for at least 150 years.

A mountain stage of the Giro d’Italia bike race was called off due to snow and ice. Beach resorts in Tuscany have been flooded. Many farmers have suffered huge damage to their crops.

Now, as June arrives, it should technically be summer. But it certainly doesn’t feel like it. “Last year, by this point, we were going to the sea. At the beginning of June we went down to the Fori Imperiali and sunbathed,” said Mario Ramelli, a street-corner florist in central Rome.

In countries such as Britain where changeable weather is a given, the coming meteorological events have always been a favoured topic of conversation. But among Italians, this so-called cursed spring appears to have created what one magazine has called the latest national obsession.

“As well as a country of saints, poets and sailors, we are now a people of meteorologists,” declared Panorama magazine, part of Silvio Berlusconi’s media empire. “The more it rains,” it noted, gloomily, “the more we become like the Americans, addicted to the weather forecast, glued to the Weather Channel, talking only of this.”

“A lot of non-Italian tourists are coming without umbrellas, and they don’t like this weather,” said Abdul Riki, one of Rome’s enterprising street-sellers who come to the rescue of foolhardy flaneurs caught in a downpour. Normally, he said, he and his colleagues would have swapped their stock for sun hats and bottles of water by now. But, judging by the forecast, there seems little point in changing just yet.

By arrangement with the Guardian