Dante’s Beach, Ravenna
I was parked up in the Land Rover Defender on the narrow road that runs alongside the strip of dense pine forest next to the sea. My three youngest children, Rita (16), Giovanni Maria (14) and Giuseppe (ten), had just been for the first swim of the year and were now inside the forest picking wild asparagus. I could not see the sea, which was about 200 yards away on the other side of the forest, but I could hear the sound of it like the low-level roar of a distant motorway.
Then I heard the honk of a car horn. I looked up from my phone, which I was using to help me contemplate the difference between Jeffrey ‘Lolita Express’ Epstein and Silvio ‘Bunga Bunga’ Berlusconi.
A small grey car had stopped next to me. The driver, his face transformed into a silhouette by the late afternoon sun, looked like E.T. He motioned me to roll down my passenger window as he rolled down his. ‘Ciao, Farrell, ciao!’ Oh God, it was Wini the naked communist!
‘What are you doing here?’ he said with a leer. The road – Cato Street – is less than a mile long and comes to a dead end at a single iron bar gate, beyond which there are fields and more forest. As Jim Morrison of the Doors warned in ‘The End’, his hymn to despair: ‘There’s danger on the edge of town/ Ride the King’s Highway, baby.’
Highly trained nudists, such as Wini the naked commie, have stolen the best stretch of the beautiful public beach in our little town from the silent majority. And Cato Street is a stage on which they and their various subspecies come to perform extra-curricular activities such as dogging.
On a Friday night in summer, cars patrol up and down in search of the show. I know this because I can see their tiny red tail lights from the windows of what is called my study, a mile or so across the fields. But this was only teatime on an out-of-season Sunday afternoon, so help me God.
‘Come on, confess! Confess!’ said comrade Wini.
‘Actually, my children are looking for asparagus,’ I replied.
‘They’d better be careful.’
‘What of? Wolves?’
‘Them too.’
The last time I had seen Wini, who I think is a retired lawyer or magistrate, was when he pounced on me last summer in the carpark outside the village bar to give me a book singing the praises of Arrigo Boldrini, a famous local partisan leader.
Some of Boldrini’s men were tried and acquitted for the slaughter near Padua of 136 unarmed members of the fascist military police and their civilian collaborators. The massacre was just one among hundreds at the end of the second world war in which Italy’s communist partisans killed up to 40,000 unarmed Italians in revenge reprisals. Boldrini used to make the absurd claim – and his followers still do – that his 600 men single-handedly liberated Ravenna.
‘It is you who must confess,’ I said.
‘But I’m an atheist.’
‘And a communist!’
Off he went in the direction of the one-bar gate.
I was contemplating Epstein and Berlusconi because I too am mentioned in the Epstein files. Steve Bannon, voice of the MAGA base, sent an interview I did with him for The Spectator to Epstein in December 2018. Bannon, a stridently traditional cultural Catholic who has been married three times, had told me Pope Francis was ‘beneath contempt’ because he had sided with ‘the global liberal elite against the citizens of the nations of the world’.
Via Bannon, I alighted on Berlusconi because in the US Department of Justice’s online Epstein archive, I came across a March 2011 letter from Epstein’s lawyer to the Telegraph demanding it stop calling him a paedophile.
Highly trained nudists have stolen the best stretch of the beautiful public beach from the silent majority
This was ‘in stark contrast to your coverage of the recent scandal involving Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi’, said the letter, ‘where we can find no reference in your reports to him being described as a paedophile in the face of similar charges’. Epstein was convicted in 2008 of ‘procuring a person under 18 for prostitution’, it explained, but ‘has not been convicted nor been accused of being a “paedophile”.’
At the time, Berlusconi was under investigation for – among much else – paid sex with a minor, a 17-year-old Moroccan belly dancer nicknamed Ruby Rubacuori (Ruby the Heart-Stealer), and the subject of global ridicule for his ‘elegant soirées’, as he called them, in the ‘Bunga Bunga’ room at his mansion near Milan.
When I interviewed him in 2003 for The Spectator at his summer palace in Sardinia, I was struck by the preponderance of statues and paintings of young naked women in the vast reception room. But I am convinced that Silvio Il Magnifico, although he had a dragon’s passion for young women, did not have an obsession for sex with underage girls. Unlike Epstein.
He genuinely believed that the Heart-Stealer was over 18 and although he had paid her loads of money was acquitted on appeal. None of the countless other women with whom he was sexually involved was under 18. Whereas dozens of women went to the police to accuse Epstein of sexual violence, none did in the case of Berlusconi. I know whose parties I’d have rather gone to in the days when I did that sort of thing.
As dusk was falling, the children came back safe and sound from the forest with a huge amount of asparagus, despite it being so early in the season.
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