The one to find shade, the one to look for fountains, the one to complain about the heat, and all the apps we discovered we desperately need because of the heatwave.

They are called shademaps.app, fontanelle.org, and troppocaldo.it. It will be hard to do without them in the future.

The heatwave that has hit half of Europe in the last two weeks has turned getting around cities into a survival challenge: how to get from point A to point B without almost literally catching fire? This time, technology comes to our rescue and helps us navigate these incandescent islands that we once called cities. In particular, during the days of the omega block – the atmospheric phenomenon behind the heatwave – three apps have proven to be lifesaving: fontanelle.org, shademaps.app and troppocaldo.it. It’s a cliché, but clichés exist for a reason: if everyone obsessively repeats that one of the few remedies against the heat is water, constant hydration, it’s because it’s true. But let’s imagine a nightmare scenario: the heat has driven you crazy, you’ve left home at the moment when the sun is highest in the sky, you’ve realized your mistake too late, you look around, there’s no one to ask for help, not even a little bar to go into to buy a bottle of water to pour over your head. If you know fontanelle.org, you have a glimmer of hope. Founded in the early 2000s, the site leverages crowdsourcing, meaning it works thanks to the continuous contributions of users who add and review public fountains. To use it, just access the portal and authorize sharing your location via GPS: the server receives the coordinates and returns a portion of the map with markers indicating all nearby fountains. By tapping the markers, you can check the water status and notes left by the community, while a dedicated button allows you to manually add new fountains not yet registered, instantly updating the database for everyone’s benefit.But let’s imagine another nightmare scenario: around you, in the immediate vicinity, there are no fountains. The only thing you can do at this point is seek shelter in the shade, waiting for the worst to pass. This is what Shademapis for, an app launched in 2020 that simulates the projection of shadows on the Earth’s surface. The software cross-references topographic data and the height of the buildings surrounding the user with the astronomical trajectory of the sun. Once the street name is entered in the search bar, the user can interact with a timeline and a slider that, when dragged along the timeline, allows calculating the angle of incidence of sunlight relative to the buildings, showing the real-time movement of shaded areas. It is also possible to switch from a two-dimensional view to a three-dimensional perspective to assess the actual height of the buildings and understand which sidewalk will be protected from light at the exact time of one’s passage.

But let’s imagine a scenario where you have no escape: around you, there are no fountains and no shade. At this point, there’s only one thing left to do: complain, curse, damn the climate crisis and the extreme heat. And here we are at troppocaldo.it, a platform designed as a pressure valve for overheated citizens. The site allows users, through a scoring system that includes “votes” like “how hot it is” to “it’s not the heat, it’s the humidity,” to register their degree of psychological (and thermal) discomfort and to share in real time the state of discomfort related to the temperatures in their area, creating a sort of socio-emotional thermometer for the cities.