Feeling the heat: the cost of Italy's worst drought in decades

I arrived at Milan's Garibaldi Train Station on a torrid July evening. It was 20.00 CET and the temperature was still a suffocating 34ºC. 

The city's taxi drivers were on strike, so it took me much longer than I had expected to arrive at my hotel.

When I did, I was sweating profusely. It was somehow an appropriate introduction to the story I was covering.

Faced with what has been described as the most severe drought in 70 years, in early July the Italian government declared a state of emergency in five northern regions. Two weeks later, there had been no significant rainfall and the situation had gotten worse. 

I had been dispatched to report on how the extreme lack of water was affecting ordinary Italian people, and how local, regional and national authorities were coping with the emergency.

Together with my fixer Francesco Gilioli, I travelled some 800 km around the three stricken regions of Lombardia, Piamonte, and Emilia Romagna.

We met rice producers who were forced to choose between which fields to irrigate and which to let die. A corn producer told us he had already lost 30 percent of his crop and was expecting many more plants to die before the harvest. 

Another corn producer took me to his dying plantations; the irrigation canals around were literally covered with spiderwebs, like something in the movies.

Agriculture is by far the most severely affected sector by the lack of water - but it's not the only one.  Near Piacenza, I met fishermen who were trying to save dying fish from small streams that were drying up, by transferring them to healthier rivers elsewhere in the region. 

Nicolas Sivelli, a recreational fisherman, invited me on his boat for a trip along the Po River. The extremely low water level has turned huge