The heat is on. Around here, it averages 32 to 33 degrees in the shade.
We are well into the season of scorched landscapes, dusty paths, noisy cicadas and ever-needing-to-be-moved garden sprinklers, not to mention cheeky lizards whose settler mentality tends to regard walls, even inside ones, as territories to be happily occupied.
An even cheekier snake has, on at least one occasion this summer, prompted the deployment of aircraft carriers, ground-to-air missiles and a hosepipe by climbing onto the family garden terrace.
After much cacophony, not to say hosepipe rattling and a sound dose of water, our reptilian friend departed - leaving behind hysterical females of differing ages.
The snake business is a difficult one. No matter how often one explains that snakes like humans even less than humans like snakes, there are still those convinced that a snake is out there just waiting to get them.
No matter how often one explains that the vast majority of snakes we see in these rustic Northern Lazio parts are harmless biscie or grass snakes, there are still those members of the extended family (usually female) who insist that every second rustle in the grass is proof positive that a family of pythons has taken up residence in the garden next door.
There are, of course, poisonous snakes in these parts, namely the vipera or viper. He, however, is even less sociable than the biscia and almost always hears, senses, feels you long before you see him.
Once, when sitting silently and alone on the beach of a little cove on the lake, my daily perusal of Gazzetta Dello Sport (the only serious rag a hack must read) was interrupted by the vision of a viper in short, swift and ultimately successful pursuit of a frog.
The vipera pounced, swallowed and imbibed with lightning efficiency before taking a casual look in my direction - I was sitting just about a metre away - and then made off for a well-earned postprandial nap.
And that is about as close as I have come to vipers (of the animal variety, at least) in 12 years of lakeside living.
The snakes, of course, like everyone else, feel the heat and, accordingly, come down from the wooded hillsides around the village and move towards the lake in search of a drink. There is, too, a type of small biscia that lives in the lake and which, when it appears uninvited close to a crowded beach, tends to prompt the sort of reaction normally reserved for rats in the rosebed.
That crowded beach, too, is a reminder of the doppelganger life led by our village, Trevigano, which for three months of the year becomes a lakeside holiday resort. It never ceases to amaze me how the "Agnew 1947 Reading Room" (or Jolo's bar) undergoes a process of beach-culture metamorphosis in which people wearing togs or bikinis (the latter usually wrapped up in gaudy dish towels) insist on interrupting the holy-hour morning read of Gazzetta by bouncing in to order their cappuccino.
The great thing, of course, about conformist Italian living is that this is officially holiday time. If stuck for something to say, while renewing your TV commentator's contract for instance, you can always lean across the executive desk and ask: "So, is it mountain or sea, Trentino or Sardinia, this summer, Massimo?"
On one aspect of this summer, however, we have some inside track information, hot from the youngest member of the household.
Just in case you were unsure, in Italy this summer the following are fico (cool): single-piece sunglasses by Gucci; the song Sole, Cuore, Amore (Sun, Heart and Love) by Valeria Rossi; not-too-baggy shorts and sandals of the lace-up and wrap-around-your-ankle variety.
Myself, just as soon as I get out of the Irish Times regulation dinner jacket worn by all foreign correspondents when putting finger to keyboard, I will be getting back into flowery (non-fico) shorts and Wood Quay-era sandals.
Have a nice one.