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Italy’s Prisons Were Overcrowded. Then They Overheated.

As temperatures in the country continue to approach 90 degrees Fahrenheit, inmates have been sleeping on concrete cell floors. Even the guards have complained.

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Reporting from Rome, Elisabetta Povoledo interviewed inmates, guards, wardens and prisoners’ rights campaigners.

Sept. 22, 2026

As Italy sweltered through its hottest summer in 75 years, inmates at one of the country’s largest prisons took to sleeping on their cell floors, according to Fabio Falbo, one of those incarcerated there.

Despite the cockroaches scuttling across the concrete, the ground was cooler than their bunks, Mr. Falbo explained to me in a letter from the Rebibbia prison in Rome.

All told, it was the worst summer in his 17 years of incarceration, a “claustrophobic hell of stone and flesh,” wrote Mr. Falbo, who is serving a murder sentence, though he maintains his innocence.

Across Italy’s roughly 200 detention facilities this summer, record heat levels made the penal experience a health hazard as well as a punishment, according to interviews with prisoners, jailers, prison directors and rights campaigners.

Temperatures inside cells regularly topped 100 degrees Fahrenheit, according to an independent prison watchdog, Antigone. That heat — coupled with the absence of air-conditioning, a shortage of fans and inadequate ventilation — placed “a significant strain on correctional facilities, exacerbating pre-existing logistical problems,” the watchdog said in a recent report.

The stifling conditions are compounded by widespread overcrowding, a problem that successive governments have failed to solve. There are nearly 65,000 prisoners in Italian detention facilities, crammed into cells built for less than 47,000.

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