One Country Drowns Every Summer, the Other Simply Refuses to Show Up

🇰🇷 South Korea vs 🇮🇹 Italy — Weather and How Locals Cope

By Suki Nakamura, Out of Office

South Korea handles its brutal summer monsoon the way it handles most things — with relentless, well-organised, slightly overwhelming efficiency, dehumidifiers running in every apartment like a national appliance mandate. Italy handles its summer heat by simply declining to participate in August altogether, closing the shop, driving to the coast, and letting the entire country bake gently at a lower operational capacity until September restores order. Both are entirely rational responses to weather that would flatten a lesser civilisation. Only one of them involves actual dehumidifier small talk.

I have watched mould bloom on a Seoul apartment wall within four days during jangma season, and I have tried to buy a bottle of water in a Sicilian village at 2pm in August only to be met with a shuttered door and profound silence. Both experiences taught me something. Neither was pleasant.

Do's & Don'ts: South Korea

Do's & Don'ts: Italy

South Korea: Fighting Water With Machines

Korean summer isn't just hot, it's actively hostile — the jangma monsoon season arrives in late June and drenches the country in heavy, sudden downpours through August, layered on top of heat and humidity that turns simply existing outdoors into a damp, exhausting chore. South Korea's response to this has been, characteristically, to out-engineer the problem: dehumidifiers are a standard household appliance rather than a luxury, mould-proofing sprays occupy entire supermarket aisles, and buildings are designed with the assumption that moisture will try to get in and must be actively repelled at every turn.

The cultural coping mechanisms are just as thorough. Portable neck fans and handheld electric fans (son-seonpoongi) are ubiquitous in summer, worn without any self-consciousness by office workers, students, and grandmothers alike. Convenience stores stock instant cooling patches and cold barley tea by the fridge-load. Air conditioning, once a genuine luxury, is now treated as an absolute baseline utility — apartments without a functioning unit are considered close to uninhabitable in July and August, and Seoul has opened cooling shelters and public spaces specifically to protect the elderly and outdoor workers during the worst heatwave spikes, treating extreme heat as a genuine public health emergency rather than a seasonal inconvenience to shrug off.

What makes Korea's approach distinctly Korean is the sheer speed and coordination of it — jangma forecasts are followed with the same intensity as a stock ticker, entire cities adjust commuting patterns around predicted downpours, and there's no cultural instinct to simply "push through" bad weather the way some cultures do. If it's dangerous outside, you adapt the infrastructure, not the person.

Italy: Simply Declining to Be Available

Italy's answer to brutal summer heat is older, slower, and arguably wiser: don't fight it, avoid it. Ferragosto, the 15 August public holiday, functions as the anchor of a broader unofficial national shutdown — small businesses, family-run trattorias, and entire towns close for one to three weeks around it, owners and staff alike decamping to the coast or the mountains, leaving cities like Rome and Milan strangely, beautifully empty except for tourists wandering past shuttered shopfronts wondering where everyone went. The answer is: somewhere cooler, and rightly so.

The riposo — the extended midday rest, once dismissed by outsiders as simple laziness — is a genuinely sensible adaptation to heat that makes early afternoon activity actively dangerous in the peak of summer. Shops close, streets empty, and life pauses between roughly 1pm and 4pm in much of southern Italy, only to resurface in the early evening when temperatures drop and the passeggiata, the evening stroll, restores the streets to life, dinner rarely starting before 9pm precisely because nobody in their right mind wants to eat a heavy meal in the day's residual heat.

Italy's public infrastructure also quietly supports this: free public drinking fountains, the nasoni in Rome chief among them, dot cities everywhere, meaning nobody is more than a few minutes from free, safe drinking water — a small but telling sign of a culture that has spent centuries adapting its cities to Mediterranean heat rather than importing foreign solutions wholesale. Health authorities do issue genuine heatwave warnings, particularly for the elderly, but the deeper cultural response has always been behavioural rather than mechanical: slow down, get out of the sun, and trust that the evening will restore you.

The Verdict

Korea fights its weather with technology and coordination; Italy simply refuses to be present for the worst of it. Both strategies work, which is the annoying part — you cannot declare either one objectively superior. But if forced to choose which philosophy I'd rather live inside, I'll take Italy's: there is something genuinely restorative about a culture that has decided the correct response to unbearable heat is a long lunch, a nap, and a walk after dark, rather than a dehumidifier and a spreadsheet of monsoon forecasts. Korea copes better. Italy copes happier.

What Nobody Warned You About

Reddit r/expats — paraphrased: didn't buy a dehumidifier my first jangma season in Seoul and found mould on the inside of my closet within a week — every Korean friend just said "yeah, that happens if you don't run one."

Internations Rome — paraphrased: arrived in Rome on 14 August expecting a normal city and found half the shops shuttered with handwritten "chiuso per ferie" signs until September.

expat.com South Korea forum — paraphrased: nobody warns you that leather bags left in storage during jangma season basically need to be thrown away by the time you find them again.

Conclusion

Neither country is being unreasonable — Korea's summer genuinely requires machinery to survive comfortably, and Italy's genuinely rewards simply stepping out of the way of it. What both share is an honest relationship with their climate: no pretending August in Rome or July in Seoul is business as usual, no performative toughing it out for appearances. Adapt like a Korean or disappear like an Italian, but whatever you do, don't show up assuming either country's summer will meet you halfway. It won't. It never has.