Wildfires in Italy: Sicily, Sardinia and emergency numbers

Both islands dominate Italian fire statistics, but for different reasons.

Sicily suffers from simultaneity. Under a scirocco episode dozens of fronts can open on the same day, and with a limited number of Canadair aircraft nationally, water drops effectively queue. Abandoned farmland makes it worse: once cultivation stops, grass and weeds build continuous, tall fine fuel right along roads. Etna's slopes add pine plantations on steep ground.

Sardinia has the opposite issue — fewer fires, but harder ones. Tall maquis covers terrain with a genuinely poor road network, and there are areas where the only practical access is by air. The 2021 Montiferru fire burned roughly 20,000 hectares, destroyed centuries-old olive groves and forced several hundred evacuations.

For travellers, the practical difference is this: on Sicily check whether your route crosses an active front, because inland roads close. On Sardinia the risk is being cut off in a coastal village with a single access road.

The points are thermal anomalies from the VIIRS instrument aboard NOAA-20 and Suomi NPP. They are temperature readings rather than confirmed fires, and each satellite crosses a given point only a few times daily — a fire starting at midday may not appear until the night pass.

Detections above 30 MW carry a flame icon, since above that threshold you are almost certainly looking at real vegetation burning. Below it, Italian readings include a lot of noise: stubble burning in Puglia and Sicily, steel works, cement kilns and above all the refinery flares at Priolo and Gela on Sicily and Sarroch on Sardinia, which burn continuously and appear at identical coordinates every night.

A line of detections running northwest to southeast during a scirocco episode is one wind-driven front, not separate incidents.

The Italian system has two tiers, and knowing this makes press reports far easier to follow. Regions handle first response, each with its own organisation, volunteer network and often its own helicopters. The state steps in with heavy air support when a region is overwhelmed.

The AIB campaign — antincendio boschivo — runs from 15 June to 15 October. During the peak window of 1 July to 5 September 2026, the state air fleet comprises 15 Canadair CL-415 aircraft on the flight line plus 4 heavy Erickson S-64F helicopters. Across the whole campaign a further 9 helicopters from the armed forces and the Carabinieri are added. In extreme situations Italy can call on aircraft co-funded by the European Commission under rescEU.

The Canadair fleet moved from Civil Protection to the Vigili del Fuoco, the national fire service. Of 19 airframes, 15 stay on the line while the rest rotate through maintenance. Flight coordination runs through COAU, the unified air operations centre, with round-the-clock regional centres called SOUP.

On the ground the fire is commanded by a DOS — Direttore delle Operazioni di Spegnimento — who decides whether and where a Canadair drops. Cause investigation belongs to the Carabinieri Forestali, who absorbed the former state forest corps in 2017.

Regional capacity is substantial. Lazio alone fields over 230 volunteer organisations, more than 700 firefighting vehicles and 7 regional helicopters for the 2026 campaign. Italy's volunteer pillar is a real force, not an afterthought.

Maritime and Aleppo pine along the coast bring resin and low crowns. Beneath them grows maquis — mastic, heather, kermes oak, myrtle and rosemary: dense shrubs full of essential oils forming a vertical fuel ladder into the canopy. Once flame reaches the crowns, ground crews cannot hold the fire.

Eucalyptus, planted widely across the south, grows fast but carries volatile oils in its leaves that encourage crown fire and throw embers far ahead of the front.

The engine is the scirocco, a hot dry wind off Africa that can lift temperature ten degrees in a few hours while crushing humidity below 20 per cent. Under scirocco, fire behaviour becomes very hard to predict and air drops lose effectiveness because water disperses before reaching the ground.

Rural abandonment compounds all of it. The mosaic of crops, pasture and grazing that once fragmented the landscape has largely gone across the Mezzogiorno, leaving fuel continuity where firebreaks used to exist naturally.

Italy records several thousand forest fires in a typical year, distributed very unevenly. Sicily, Calabria, Sardinia and Puglia account for the bulk of burned area; the north stays relatively calm outside unusually dry summers in Piedmont and Liguria.

The recent benchmark is Sardinia's Montiferru fire of 2021 at roughly 20,000 hectares. Sicily in the same year and subsequent seasons has dealt with dozens of concurrent fronts under scirocco conditions.

Causes are a subject of separate debate in Italy, because the share of deliberate ignition runs higher than the European average. Motives vary: land speculation, disputes over grazing rights, and stubble burning that escapes control. Ordinary negligence adds the rest — machinery sparks, cigarettes and ageing power lines. This is precisely why the Carabinieri Forestali treat cause determination as a full criminal investigation rather than a formality.

• Call 112 — EU-wide, works without a SIM card and on a locked phone, English available. 115 reaches the Vigili del Fuoco directly. 1515 is the historic forest service line, now run by the Carabinieri Forestali for environmental reports.
• Keep emergency alerts enabled. Italy uses IT-Alert via Cell Broadcast, reaching every phone in an area without mobile data or an Italian SIM. The system is newer than the Greek or Spanish equivalents and used more sparingly, so do not assume silence means safety.
• Sheltering beats fleeing once the front is close — a masonry building with windows shut is safer than a narrow road in smoke.
• Evacuating by car: windows closed, air conditioning on recirculate, headlights on, never parked on the shoulder of an evacuation route.
• Move perpendicular to the wind, never uphill ahead of the flames.

Keep screenshots of any official alert you receive — they are the basis of a later claim on a flight or booking. Live tracking in Polish: where fires are burning in Italy and Sicily situation report.