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Describing last week's count of 236 forest fires across Italy (most of them in the south) as a national emergency, environment minister Alfonso Pecoraro Scanio called for "the criminals behind these conflagrations" to be hunted down and punished. Over the summer there have been literally thousands of fires - over 300 were reported on July 24th alone. While the fires could just as well have been caused by dropped cigarette butts, or the coals from barbecue grills, Italians resist such mundane explanations; and there have been enough proven cases of arson over the years to make more alarming explanations terribly plausible.

The Vatican has been extreme in its condemnation of arsonists this summer. One bishop, speaking on Vatican radio, described setting fire to a wood as "an infamous crime" for which the perpetrator should be excommunicated and "pursued with the same intensity with which the church attack those who destroy life in a mother's womb". From a pulpit in Palermo, a priest cursed the pyromaniacs for their "abominable and devastating wickedness" and demanded harsher legal penalties against them.

Newspapers are reporting that Mezzogiorno farmers feel sympathy for farmers in the U.K., who are losing herds of livestock as the British countryside is in the midst of another outbreak of foot and mouth disease. But, as the Italian press is quick to point out, foot and mouth disease kills only animals, not people, whereas several people have already died in Italy's forest fires. The latest victim, a 21-year-old soldier, burned to death last week while helping to put out a fire near Cosenza in Calabria during four days' home leave from his military barracks in Florence.

Scanio claims that the fires are mostly caused by criminals – either as part of gang warfare or set on behalf of property developers seeking to clear land for housing. The latter is a familiar story in the Mezzogiorno because, in this region, when woodland has been destroyed permission to build is often more easily obtainable, especially when local officials are corrupt as they so often are in this part of the world.

Ten days ago the 57-year-old Klaus Lichtenberg was caught setting fire to some woodland near Cosenza. It doesn't sound likely that a Calabrian gang would hire an elderly German citizen to do its dirty work for it. But then no one thought that 6 members of the ‘Ndrangheta would be corralled and murdered in Duisburg, Germany, as happened yesterday afternoon. Lichtenberg, it is alleged, just set the fire for the hell of it. Or maybe it’s payback for the beach towels of Germans being burned on Italian beaches earlier in the season. Although, to be fair, Germans with a beach towel are a 5 am menace well known to anyone who’s spent much time holidaying in Europe and it’s not like the Italian farmers snuck out at 5 am to lay out their land in the bestest spot on the hillside now, is it?!

It's clear that some people start forest fires simply for the thrill of it – we’ve seen that here, in Greece, and in the U.S., so far this summer. To cause such vast destruction with one strike of a match, to bring out teams of fire fighters in helicopters and trucks, not to mention national guardsmen and soldiers, and to watch them battling in vain against the flames; all these things must give the lowly arsonist a heady sense of power.

And the thing with arson is that, unless you are crazy enough to commit it in public, it is a crime that almost always escapes detection. Unlike rolling out a beach towel at 5 am, that you plan upon sprawling on until the sun goes down…

This image, captured by the ‘Aqua’ satellite on July 22, 2007, shows multiple fires across southern Europe. The red dots show the locations of the fires - the black lines denote country borders. Smoke drifts over the Ionian Sea, and the fires are visible throughout Italy, Greece, Albania, Croatia, Bosnia, and other nearby countries. The fires have been causing evacuations and destroying hundreds of thousands of acres of forest. According to the Associated Press, the wildfires have even caused shells from past wars to explode, from WWI in Macedonia, and from WWII and The Greek Civil War of the 1940s, in Greece.