Summertime

Sunburn, Salt, and First Love

I keep thinking about the way Summertime uses the Adriatic coast as more than a postcard. The beaches are bright, yes, and the sky looks scrubbed clean in that Italian-summer way that makes every emotion seem a little more ridiculous than usual. But the show is less interested in scenic pleasure than in what heat does to people: how it slows them down, how it loosens their manners, latestnetflix.com argues, how it makes a glance feel like a decision.

That’s where this series lives. In the pause before someone speaks. In the tiny, disastrous courage of walking up to the person you probably shouldn’t want.

What’s interesting is that Summertime arrives with a built-in inheritance. It’s an Italian Netflix young-adult series, and that already places it in conversation with a whole run of streaming-era teen stories that want to be sunlit without becoming shallow. It also sits inside a distinctly Italian tradition of coming-of-age fiction, where class, family, and social codes are never far away, even when the plot is nominally about flirting and missed chances.

I’m not entirely sure the show always knows how much it’s carrying. Sometimes it seems to want to be light on its feet, almost airy, and then—without warning—it remembers that adolescence isn’t just a season but a kind of social pressure cooker.

The central attraction is simple enough: Ale and Summer are drawn together, and the series builds its emotional weather around that magnetism. What matters isn’t the fact of their romance so much as the choreography of it. The show keeps finding them in thresholds—doorways, piers, scooter rides, the edges of parties, the seams between afternoon and evening.

That’s smart. First love is often less a story than a series of almosts, and the directors of the episodes understand that hesitation can be more revealing than declaration. A hand hovering near another hand.

A face that looks away half a second too late. These little delays do most of the work.

I was especially taken with the show’s relationship to movement. Characters are forever in transit: on bikes, in cars, along boardwalks, across crowded beaches. Even when the dialogue gets a little too polished, the camera keeps returning to bodies in motion, which gives the series a physical honesty it sometimes lacks on the page.