CREMONA – Hot and sultry summers, humid and gray winters. Yes: but the climate of Cremona is not as inhospitable as one might believe. In 2023, in fact, the city of Torrazzo ranked 58th among the 108 Italian provincial capitals with respect to the 17 parameters that define the climate liveability index. The dossier, developed for the third year by the iLMeteo.it team of experts led by the meterologist Lorenzo Tedious, was published in the last few hours by Corriere della Sera. The parameters, the analysts specify, were compared hour after hour, day by day for 24 years for a total of over 380 million data points.
From the temporal comparison it clearly emerges that Cremona, stable at the bottom of the ranking until the first half of the 1910s, has significantly improved its position in the last decade. As if climate change had smoothed the hardest edges of the hostile Po Valley atmospheric conditions. There is very little to celebrate, obviously: the iLMeteo.IT dossier provides, in fact, the photograph of a climate in negative evolution throughout the country.
Based on the data, Cremona confirms itself as one of the capitals of fog: there are 77 days in which (as Pascoli put it) the “smoke that is still rising” cloaks the city. Only Pavia, Mantua, Venice, Treviso and Pisa are foggier than the Stradivarian lands. The Cremonese capital, however, is placed in 14th place for the number of cold days: only two in the whole of 2023, with a wide gap compared to the 15 days collected by Aosta.
The situation is different for frost days (i.e. those with minimum temperatures below 0°C): 36 in total, less than half compared to the 75 recorded in Cuneo. Under ‘extreme heat’ the city of Torrazzo is 62nd, with only five days in which the mercury recorded temperatures above 35 degrees. Cremona doesn’t even stand out for its levels of drought: 82 days, just over a third compared to the 204 of (unwillingly) league leaders Cagliari. As for the rainy days, the iLMeteo.it staff counted 75 against 106 in very rainy Gorizia.
