Wildfires in Italy

So here I am  back in Italy, in the little house in the olive grove, where it is hot, hot, hot - as the locals put it 'caldo a morire' which translates roughly 'hot enough to die'.  Today it was around 40 degrees with no vestige of a breeze.

We walked along to the little bar in the village last night, to watch the sunset, but found ourselves watching wildfires instead.  The photographs were taken in very dark conditions so it's difficult to see all the fires that we could see.   One big one to the right of the church tower, another further over almost obscured by the tree branch,  there was another one on the other side of the hill generating a lot of smoke,  and shortly after we took this photo two more appeared on the hills just above the top of the tower.  You can just see a number of points of light in this picture. 

They were using helicopters and specially adapted planes to douse them. The planes actually touch the surface of the sea, ploughing a white furrow, in order to scoop up water.

Then they fly into the smoke to drop it all on the blaze. It's very skilful flying and very impressive to watch.

This morning the whole valley beneath us was under a pall of smoke.