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Mosquito Post

August 20th, 2014 · No Comments · Uncategorized

The fly in the ointment of your dream vacation to Tuscany?

Mosquitoes!

Or as the Italians say, onomatapoetically, it would seem, the zanzara.

(Hear it? Buzzzzz.)

Summer, not surprisingly, is the high season for mosquitoes here, and mosquitoes in Tuscany are particularly infamous.

(A google search for “Tuscany” … “mosquitoes” yields 101,000 hits.)

One blogger wrote:

“The local variety of mosquitoes is voracious, and they inflict welts on some people that are quite different from what Americans are used to, from our more genteel varieties.”

Yes. Exactly.

The danger periods are dusk, of course … or near standing water, or if you venture outside without head-to-toe covering — or pretty much anytime you are outside. Or inside, if you are not in the rare building with screens on the windows — because you want the windows open, if possible, in the Tuscan summer.

So, our party has been swarmed by mosquitoes, which are smaller and shiftier than their U.S. cousins. In seven days here, I have managed to kill one — who had her beak sunk in my knee at the time.

In Florence, in Siena, in San Gimignano, tourists in their short pants are strolling here, there and everywhere — and every single one of them has red welts on their legs from mosquito bites.

The welts not only are the size of a dime or nickel, they are a bright red, especially if itched, which pretty much is inevitable.

The bites also are supremely itchy and form a sort of hard spot around the site of the bite, which is uncomfortable to the touch, on the first or second day after being bitten.

(Note: In nearly five years in the UAE I cannot recall an instance of seeing a mosquito. Not one. That could come from the lack of standing water in a particularly dry corner of the world. Meanwhile, in the New World, in New Jersey, for example, the mosquito is sometimes called “the state bird”, because they are so big — but apparently not as damaging as the Tuscan variety.)

As we go along, as the five bites from yesterday begin to fade a little, not quite as itchy, not quite as beet red, we get five new ones. Or maybe 10.

So far, the bites are only unpleasant and ugly. Moquitoes in this part of Italy are not known for carrying some of the deadly diseases some of the other 3,500 varieties of their kind can transmit — malaria, yellow fever and dengue fever.

How to avoid them?

–Stay inside with the doors and windows shut — unless you have screens.

–Cover yourself in repellant/poison.

–Look for areas where local authorites are particularly aggressive in searching out mosquito breeding areas — standing water, in particular. Or avoid areas where little or nothing is done about them.

If the vector control people in Tuscany are fighting mosquitoes, they are losing the war. To go outside is to be sure of one bite, and if your timing is off, you can pick up six welts in a moment.

It is the females who suck blood out of vertebrates, to generate the energy to lay more eggs. The males are more likely to make that buzzing sound near your ear that drives a person slap-happy.

Next week, while missing the green of Italy, and its warmth and fantastic sights and hospitality, we hope to be a in climate a little less conducive to swarms of bloodsucking bugs.

 

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