Dante’s Beach, Ravenna
It was midnight, more or less, and my middle daughter, Magdalena, 18, said with all the untroubled bravado of youth: ‘Let’s go and find il rospo!’
She was at the wheel of the Land Rover Defender and we were involved in a nocturnal driving lesson. Rospo is Italian for toad. And if you say ‘Dio Rospo’ (‘Toad God’), that’s blasphemy, so as a good Catholic she doesn’t, whereas, as a bad one, I do because it is funny, as God would surely agree.
‘Il rospo’ is our family nickname for the fat man with the eyes of a dead person who emerges after dark in the village thanks to the theft of part of our beautiful beach by highly trained nudists. Nudism, whatever holier-than-thou nudists claim, involves creatures like il rospo and one of their favourite extra-curricular activities, as I’ve said before, is dogging.
Normally, il rospo parks his big white 4×4 to watch and wait at the start of the narrow little road, running parallel to the dense pine forest next to the sea, where all the action takes place. We wanted to give him the middle finger on behalf of the living. Tonight, however, there was no sign of him there.
Driving with Magdalena can be pretty hairy. The other day she broke the Defender’s front differential when she changed from second into first instead of up to third.
So I told Magdalena to take it easy as we proceeded along Cato Street into the heart of darkness. The little road is unlit, hardly wide enough to swing a cat and full of humps caused by the roots of the pine trees. It peters out into a dirt track and stops at an iron bar gate, after which there are fields and more forest. A small pack of wolves lives somewhere beyond. We sometimes hear them howling.
We drove on slowly, passing half a dozen or so parked cars with solitary men inside them. But not his. Would we find him waiting for us at the end of the road?
We drove on slowly, passing
half a dozen or so parked cars with solitary men inside them
Soon we saw in our wing mirrors a pair of ominous headlights following us. When we arrived at the gate there was no one there. Was this him behind us? We waited, adrenalin pumping in the silence.
The other vehicle at last drew up next to us on my side. But it was a small white car, maybe a Renault Twingo, not a big BMW. Crammed inside, hunched manfully over the wheel, was a peroxide–blond transsexual in a leopard skin top.
As an opening gambit, I slid down my electric window. The transsexual scowled at us, and with difficulty turned his car around and disappeared. Perhaps it was my ‘Comandante Che’ beret that had done the trick, or else my face had acted like a gargoyle.
Magdalena then did a remarkably smooth multi-point turn to extract the Defender from our cul-de-sac situation. This was quite an achievement as it is a seven-seater.
‘Were you scared?’ I asked her.
‘Not with you there,’ she replied, which made me feel like a fraud.
Earlier that day Magdalena had played her viola at a wedding in church while I had gone to find the victim of a member of a similar nudist subspecies as that of il rospo. She had posted a video online in which she bravely gave her name and showed her face and spoke about what had happened.
Crammed inside, hunched manfully over the wheel, was a peroxide-blond transsexual in a leopardskin top
I went to see Giada, 26, in the restaurant she runs with her mother in the next village to ours. One morning recently she was doing meditation, fully clothed, in the dunes above a normal beach, when a man came and sat down a few yards away and started to masturbate. She whipped out her mobile phone and began shouting and filming him and he did a runner. She did not manage to get his face on film. ‘When I shared the post, many women replied to say it happens all the time,’ she said. ‘But we must speak out. He knows who I am, but I am not scared.’
In her video, Giada also urges women to carry a pepper spray, ‘not in your bag but clipped to your belt or in your pocket so it’s ready’, and demonstrates how to use it like a pistol. She then takes off her baseball hat and comes right up to the camera to address her attacker: ‘Sorry if I scared you, but women today are not afraid.’
I have a confession to make. Years ago, before our children were born, I too sometimes used to go to the nudist beach with my wife, Carla. And a similar thing happened to us in 2003, which I even wrote about in The Spectator: ‘I have gradually begun to realise that Dante’s Beach doesn’t attract just poets like myself. Once, I looked up from the book I was trying halfheartedly to read and there was a group of four or five naked men gathered around us like Red Indians – masturbating. “Be off the lot of you!” I said sternly. They all scarpered except one bloke, who had such a pleasant smile on his face that I let him alone. When he had finished, he crouched down beside my girl and said. “Grazie. Grazie mille. You are so beautiful.”’
Look, if Saul was allowed to see the light on the road to Damascus, then so am I on Dante’s Beach.
Madgalena and I did not find il rospo. But it was, no doubt, just as well.
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