HOT WEATHER Italians warm up to idea of A/C

The record heat is melting Italians' age-old resistance to air conditioning.
ROME (AP) -- From babyhood, Italians are steeped in old wives' tales that cold air can be bad for your health, particularly in the summer.
With the air of self-appointed saviors, the first thing many Italians do when climbing aboard an air-conditioned city bus is open all the windows.
Foreigners asking waiters to turn up the A/C have long been viewed as modern-day barbarians.
But Italian resistance to air conditioners has started to melt.
Those who manufacture, install or sell air conditioners say the last few blistering summers -- including this season's scorcher, Italy's hottest in some 50 years -- have speeded up what had been a slow erosion of national bias against air conditioning.
Stores sell out
"We've sold out, and more than once already this season," said Mose' Di Veroli in his appliance store Cucciollo in Rome's historic center.
De'Longhi SpA, a major Italian appliance maker, said there was such a boost in demand this year that it diverted to the Italian market some air conditioners that had been destined for the Southern Hemisphere, where summer is still months away.
"In the last 10 years, we went from selling 2,000 to 3,000 air conditioners to 70,000" a year in Italy, said Luca Farci, sales manager for air conditioning systems for Samsung Electronics Italia SpA, based in Milan.
From last year to this year alone, there was a 30-percent jump in demand, Farci said.
Guglielmo Rota, a software programmer in Rome, said he broke down and purchased an air conditioner in July. He used to reason that it didn't pay to fork out more than $1,150, the going price for a top brand and installation.
In past summers, "for 10 days, you suffer," said Rota. But he's convinced the climate is changing and heat waves will last months, not days.
Longtime believer
Decio Oberholtzer, a urologist whose Rome duplex penthouse fills with heat like a double-decker oven in summer, considers himself a pioneer. He bought his first air conditioner 20 years ago and this year he bought two.
"I believe getting a backache or a cold is better than suffering the heat," said Oberholtzer, referring to widely held Italian beliefs that a blast of cold air can harm you.
Samsung's Farci says the rapidly increasing embrace of air conditioning for homes also reflects Italians' desire for a higher standard of living, despite a sluggish economy.
"You have to think, five or six years ago Italians didn't even use air conditioning in their cars," said Farci.
While much of northern Europe shrugs off air conditioning because hot weather there is usually brief, Italy, at the continent's southern end, seemed for generations to accept sweating through summers as a way of life.
"But life went a little slower then," said Renata Suriano, who works at a two-year-old shop in Rome doing brisk business in air conditioner sales and installation.
Regulations
Yet a myriad of regulations could crimp air conditioning's expansion.
Italy's main business daily, Il Sole-24 Ore, devoted an entire page recently to the intricacies of laws limiting where condominium owners can install air conditioners.
Historic city centers have even stricter rules.
The nation's expensive and often inadequate supply of electricity also complicates the quest for cool.
In many homes, you must decide whether to run the washing machine or turn on the electric oven. And that was before air conditioning caught on.
The blackouts plaguing many parts of Italy early in the heat wave were the first in some 20 years, another measure of air conditioning's rising popularity.
Confronted with this new culture of cool, etiquette experts have had to come up with fresh rules. Milan daily Corriere della Sera recently offered these do's and don'ts: Always ask permission before turning on the air conditioning and don't use it when young children or the elderly are around.