Snippets from the Italian Scene
The Sky is Falling
Last week was freezing. Not just in the Alps, where it's supposed to be cold at this time of year, but also down in the flatlands as well, and south too, where they got a tremendous amount of snow in the mountains. Ecstatic skiers flocked to Mount Etna and many inland towns in Calabria and Basilicata were isolated for days. This sort of thing happens every few years, so it wasn't that out-of-the-ordinary. However, the falling ice that accompanied the cold was: Blocks weighing between 1 and 20 pounds rained down all over the Peninsula, at first a couple a day, but the number increased rapidly to a hundred or more. One landed in the courtyard of a convent just before the Sisters went to Mass, another hit a guy who was cleaning a mall parking lot at 6 AM, and for a while people kept an eye on the sky as they walked about.
While it's obvious that many of the blocks were tossed by jokers, some are harder to explain -- very pure ice, with none of the contaminants associated with rain or tap water, and odd geometric shapes. Some suggested the blocks were falling from planes (the one that hit the man would have killed him had the blow not been glancing, and had he not been wearing two hats because of the cold), but transportation safety people say accumulations of these magnitudes would cause a plane to crash. Others suggested space, but the experts nixed that too. Now they're guessing unusual interactions between southern and northern air masses, with winds strong enough to support ice chips that then grew as they fell to ground. In the meantime it has warmed, and the phenomenon has stopped. We may never know what it was.
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