Dante’s Beach, Ravenna
The beautiful big leaves on the fig tree outside the window of my ‘study’ are falling to the ground, at the rate of one every five minutes or so, and I think I am falling sick with Stockholm syndrome.
I live surrounded by six children and a wife who all loathe Donald Trump, Benjamin Netanyahu and Giorgia Meloni. So successful has the propaganda been that my Italian family – like so many millions of people – believe, most depressingly, that Israel is guilty of genocide in Gaza.
‘Twenty thousand children killed!’ they chant. In vain have I pointed out the actual meaning of the word ‘genocide’, and that if the Israelis are guilty then so too were the Allies when to free the world from the Nazis, for example, their bombers killed about 45,000 German civilians in a single German city – Hamburg – over just four nights.
As was my 20-year-old uncle Arnold when in July 1944 as bomb aimer on a Lancaster, lying face down in the glass bubble at the front, he took command when it began its bombing run over Stuttgart. He and the other six on board died that night.
Genocide? No. War crimes? Maybe.
There have been loads of demos of late in Italy, and some riots, most devastatingly in Milan, much of it involving the teenage offspring of Muslim immigrants. The other day there was a general strike. Another is planned for Friday. About what? Everything.
Inflation, especially in the price of fuel, high rents, real wages that are lower than before Italy joined the euro, the AI threat to jobs, arms sales, war. Israel, of course. Fascist Trump, Fascist Netanyahu, Fascist Meloni. Above all, they demand what they call ‘a future’.
Many schools shut down for the day. Most members of my family took part, most prominently my middle daughter Magdalena, aged 19, who plays the viola and has just started a music degree.
Before the demo, she showed me a cardboard placard she had made which proclaimed: ‘Meloni fuori dai coglioni!’ (Meloni get out of our balls!) It made me laugh. It rhymes so beautifully. She sent me a photo of herself at the demo, with my youngest daughter Rita, 17, and youngest son Giuseppe, 11, holding up – Allahu Akbar! – a Palestinian flag.
Yeats wrote in his 1919 poem ‘The Second Coming’ about what he saw as the collapse of civilisation and the rise of chaos in the wake of the first world war, that ‘the best lack all conviction, the worst are full of passionate intensity’. I have always felt that the exact opposite is the case.
To get anything decent done requires passionate intensity. Without passionate intensity, Churchill – and those of our forebears who stood firm – could not have saved Britain and the free world in the dark days of 1940. Without passionate intensity my wife Carla and I would not have had six children.
And it is the passionate intensity of Magdalena, who, like her mother, is a devout Catholic, that I love. It is so much better, even though so dangerous, potentially, than the parasitical paralysis of the one million British youngsters who seem to prefer what we used to call ‘the dole’ to a job.
However misdirected in terms of identifying solutions, what those on the march across Europe are exposing is the existential crisis at the heart of our civilisation. We live in a sick society incapable of creating economic growth, or children, while welfare spending grows and grows.
I am at least talking, mainly via Whats-App, with Magdalena. Yesterday I sent her a legendary poem written by Pier Paolo Pasolini, the Italian film director and author, in June 1968. Pasolini was a communist throughout his life but in 1949 had been kicked out of Italy’s Communist party, the largest in Europe outside the Soviet Bloc, for being gay.
Then, as now, Italy’s students and workers were in insurrectional mode, though on a much smaller scale than in France. The poem, subtitled ‘I Hate You, Dear Students’, took as its focus their bloody seizure in March 1968 of the architecture faculty at Rome’s Sapienza University, which left hundreds of students and police officers injured.
He wrote: ‘You have the faces of spoilt brats./ I hate you as I hate your fathers…
‘When yesterday in Valle Giulia you began your fight/ with the police/ I sympathised with the police/ Because the police are the sons of the poor…
‘Those police lads/ who you beat up with your sacred daddy’s boy hooliganism/ belong to a different social class.’
Magdalena messaged back: ‘Molto interessante!’ In Bologna the riot police had lowered their shields, she said, and wished the demonstrators: ‘Buon sciopero!’ And she sent me a video of a young woman in Turin handing out carnations to the riot police, which they accepted.
Meanwhile, my son Francesco Winston, 21, who also took part in the general strike, is riding a camel across the desert in Morocco near Marrakesh en route for the Atlantic coast, in a dishdash and keffiyeh and looking like Lawrence of Arabia. Naturally, the keffiyeh which is wrapped around his head and face is black and white. Is there any light at the end of the tunnel? Maybe, just maybe.
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