For centuries, the travelers arriving in Italy from the northern countries have praised our mild climate, so much that the italian good weather became a sort legend. Today, however, the scholars observations about the climate tends to reverse the reputation of our country of the sun. Here are two steps: the first is the German writer J. W. Goethe, who arrived in Italy in September 1786, the second summarizes the positions most common among scholars today.

"The winter here lasts only two months, December and January. Then comes a rainy April. Regarding the seasons the weather is nice, I'm not experiencing any persistent rain. This September has been even hotter than August, but here people are complaining in general a very bad summer. Probably it hasn't been so clear as in the previous years, but i can notice that people here are very impatient. Accustomed to the weather, everyone runs in shoes, socks and thin clothes, and now they rant a bit of wind and rain, while we would be happy to have this season a time like this. "

Well we can say everyone knows that any coastal town, plain or hill, of our peninsula's climate is warmer than any city or territory of northern Europe. But not everyone knows that Manchester, for example, in England, has a milder climate than Milan, because it has less warm summers and winters less cold. In our alpine villages located between 1,800 and 2,200 meters as Cervinia for example, falls each year a quantity of snow that is 2-3 times higher than than one that Siberia receives, which has the reputation of the realm of snow. We must therefore abandon the idea that Italy is characterized by a single climate.
The opposite is true: Italy, for its geographical position, has a great variety of climates, some of which are similar to those of central Europe, others to those of  Mediterranean countries. For this reason we must add that in every place there are significant contrasts between the seasons: in Palermo for example a summer hot and dry is usually following a winter wet and rainy and  in Cortina a rather cold and snowy winter is opposed to warm and sunny summers.