In this week's Inside Sweden The Local's Nordic Editor Richard Orange reflects on a meeting with Italians fleeing the Mediterranean heat, before running through the week's stories.

In this week's Inside Sweden The Local's Nordic Editor Richard Orange reflects on a meeting with Italians fleeing the Mediterranean heat, before running through the week's stories. I'm writing this on a train out to the east coast of Skåne, sitting next to a bubbly Italian family who have just told me they are in Sweden for a 'coolcation'. It is, I think, the first time I've heard a real person use the term (which The Local first wrote about in 2024 after Conde Nast Traveller declared it the travel trend of the year). "It's 39 degrees in Rome, and that is before you add in the 80 percent humidity. It's just too much," Anniina, the mother, grimaced. She wasn't alone, she said. Their best friends were in Ireland, and they knew several more families who had fled the heat to cooler climes. Summers in Rome had been bearable 15 years ago, Matthias reflected. Then you'd only get a few days a year of sweltering 40C heat. But now, he said, you suffer from June right through to September, so a few weeks' break somewhere cooler is almost a necessity. It was actually their second coolcation, he continued, as a few weeks previously they'd been hiking in the Alps. Matthias turned out to be half Swedish, and Anniina, judging by her Finnish-seeming first name, probably isn't 100 percent Italian either, but they had both been living in Rome for well over 20 years and the family spoke Italian together. It makes me wonder whether Swedish seaside towns like Ystad, where they were staying, Båstad, or the Stockholm and Gothenburg archipelagos, might end up serving a similar function that hill stations like Mussoorie, Dharamshala, Ooty, or Murree do in Southeast Asia.