08/08/2026

It was twenty past noon on 5 August 2026 when Analía, a Spanish tourist visiting the Leaning Tower of Pisa, took out her phone and began documenting what she saw: horse-drawn carriages in full service, temperature 37 degrees, vertical sun on the asphalt. She did what one does in these situations: she looked for someone to report it to. What happened next is more instructive than the photographs she took.

The chain of referrals

The first report goes to the Nucleo Operativo Guardie Rurali Ausiliarie a difesa degli Animali of the Province of Pisa (N.O.G.R.A.). The response is formally impeccable: near the carriage station, a Local Police patrol is always present, able to intervene upon verbal request and, in cases of "evident distress" in the animals, to alert the ASL veterinarian, "the only figure authorised to verify the health of horses in cases of urgent need."

Analìa then contacts the Local Police. The officers' response: the temperature recorded in the shade is 34 degrees; the regulatory threshold is 35. Intervention is not possible. The tourist writes back to N.O.G.R.A., making an elementary observation: if it is 34 degrees in the shade, on the sun-exposed asphalt the temperature easily reaches 40 and above, with animals pulling carriages loaded with passengers. In reply, she receives the text of Article 33 of the municipal regulation — "Keeping and use of equids" — with an invitation to read point 5 carefully, highlighted in red.

What point 5 says

Point 5 establishes that the official reference temperatures are those recorded by the Centro Funzionale di Monitoraggio Meteo Idrologico-Idraulico of the Tuscany Region, with reference to the "Pisa" station located at the Faculty of Agriculture of the University of Pisa.

A fixed meteorological station, at a university site, under standardised environmental conditions. That reading — taken elsewhere in the city, in an entirely different context — is the datum that determines whether horses can or cannot work in the square, in the sun, on the asphalt.

Not the temperature on site. Not the temperature perceived by the animal in full solar exposure. Not the actual conditions: the heat reflected from the paving, the heat accumulated by the road surface after hours of irradiation, the weight of the load being pulled, the absence of cooling. The temperature recorded by a distant university monitoring station, under conditions bearing no relation whatsoever to the animal's working environment.

The regulation specifies a parameter that is technically reproducible and legally defined, but which does not measure what it should measure: the real thermal risk for the animal under those specific operating conditions.

The regulations must change

The problem is not bad faith on the part of those who responded to Analìa. N.O.G.R.A. and the Local Police applied the rule. The problem is the rule itself.

A control system that entrusts the intervention threshold to an external, fixed, non-contextualised measurement produces exactly this result: on 5 August, with 37 degrees across the city and arduous working conditions for the horses, officers could not intervene because the Faculty of Agriculture station had not yet reached the threshold. Everything formally correct. Everything substantially absurd.

This is the same mechanism IHP has repeatedly flagged in relation to ASL veterinarians: the threshold of "evident distress" as a necessary condition for action means, in practice, waiting until the situation has already deteriorated before stepping in. In the thermal case, the external and decontextualised threshold produces the same effect: intervention arrives, if it arrives at all, when the damage has already been done.

The issue Parliament must address

The Pisa episode is not the product of a system in which each municipality independently defines the criteria for using equids in urban activities. Different thresholds, different measurement methods, different procedures. No national framework establishing what constitutes thermal conditions incompatible with the work of an equid, how it is measured, who intervenes and with what instruments.

The Pisa case suggests that existing criteria are not enough. And that as long as each municipality proceeds on its own, animal welfare will remain entrusted to local regulations that may be technically impeccable and practically useless. A national law is needed — one that sets the course toward the definitive abolition of horse-drawn carriages throughout Italy. Everything else is the kind of bureaucratic hair-splitting worthy of a Manzonian pettifogging lawyer.

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