City with the best climate: Agrigento is on the podium, but Sicily doesn’t shine

June 20, 2024, 10:37 am

2 min read

ROME – Imperia is the city with the best climate in Italy for the new edition of the Climate Liveability Index, drawn up again this year by iLMeteo.it and Corriere della Sera: the Ligurian city returns to the top after two years, thanks above all to the push given by the Riviera di Ponente and places such as Sanremo and Bordighera.

Also on the podium were Biella, the real surprise of this third edition which in recent years had been penalized by severe drought, and Agrigento. The black jersey in the ranking, however, goes to Terni: the plain cities of the central regions, in fact, are greatly penalized by the combination of high summer temperatures and humidity.

Almost all the major cities are also doing badly: Milan drops two positions to 77th place, Rome climbs 50 places to 93rd and Naples falls from 19th to 79th position.

Palermo (46th), Venice (35th) and Bari (53rd) also lost points. The only ones to improve among the regional capitals are Turin, which goes from 86th to 51st, and Bologna, which gains 50 positions reaching 44th.

Among the negative surprises this year is Florence, second to last in the ranking: it is the worst due to the extreme heat, the days with maximum temperatures exceeding 35 degrees. Instead, last year’s winner, Macerata, slips to 5th place (preceded by Cuneo) due to the greater number of rainy days recorded in 2023.

“This year too, from the analysis of the data, it emerges that global warming also has a strong impact on our climate liveability index”, says Lorenzo Tedici, media meteorologist at iLMeteo.it. In fact, to keep track of it, this year 3 new indicators have been added to the 14 already present, designed to evaluate and analyze climate change in an even more in-depth way: extreme events, extreme heat and frost days.

“All the cities in the plains are feeling the effects of the sharply increasing heat in the 21st century and are losing many positions. You live definitely better in the hills and mountains – concludes Tedici – or along the coasts mitigated by the sea breeze”.