Dolce vita

Dante’s Beach, Ravenna Was it chance or destiny, I wonder, that caused the eldest of our six children, Caterina, to pull over in the dead of night and park the car where she did? She was on her way back with a young man from a beach party down the coast and had stopped next to a derelict farmhouse so she could look for shooting stars in the endless night and make a wish. That is how she found the latest animals to join our household: a very strange silver-grey cat with long legs and blackish spots and a single kitten who looked exactly the same in miniature. This tiny kitten constantly interrupted the star-gazing activities of Caterina and her suitor by straying out on to the road, followed by its mother, who was so weak that she looked half-dead.

There was not a Spaniard in sight, I was pretty sure of that. But I was surrounded by the enemy, nevertheless. Naturally, the enemy included my Italian wife, Carla. We were at the open-air restaurant for the Euro 2024 final in one of the two village campsites not far from the nudist beach. If England beat Spain, I would have a plausible excuse to break out the booze after being on the wagon for far too many months and get patriotically sloshed. I knew that none of those gathered in front of the giant TV screen beneath the stars could be from Spain, because the Spanish do not come to Dante’s Beach near Ravenna. Nudism isn’t really their cup of tea. Instead, we get loads of Germans and Dutch who drive thousands of miles to strut about naked in front of each other.

When Pope Francis complained recently about too much frociaggine (faggotry) in the Catholic Church, he certainly struck a chord in our house here at Dante’s Beach near Ravenna. Nudism used to be illegal on pain of up to three years in prison, but the nudists simply ignored the law We live a mile inland from one of the last stretches of Adriatic coast not lined by umbrellas and concrete but by sand dunes and pine forests. It is a spiaggia libera (free beach) as well, and so belongs to everyone. However, the most beautiful bit cannot be used by the silent majority: it has been stolen by a small minority of highly trained nudists, mostly gay. People who prefer to avoid mass nudity have had to go elsewhere. Many would call it Heaven though Dante himself would beg to differ.

Since I had a brush with death a couple of years ago, I have often wondered who my far younger wife, Carla, might marry after she has buried me. When I was out for the count in intensive care in Ravenna, the hospital’s duty priest, an Argentinian, even administered the last rites. ‘They do it just in case these days,’ Carla told me, as if it had all been a bit of a laugh, which I suppose it may well be if you believe, like her, that death is the prelude to eternal life. The other day, a herd of donkeys came charging into our garden out of the blue and I soon put two and two together They belonged to our nearest neighbour, Gianni, a farmer.

The sun was setting on the first day of spring and I felt unusually happy as I fed the donkey. Winter, along with the fog and all the rest of it, had gone at last. But then from somewhere near my right ear I heard a small whining sound that for a moment I did not recognise. It was the first mosquito of the year. And I remembered how biblical it all gets round here under the Italian sun, insect-wise. Sometimes I wish I’d stayed up in the Apennines where there were no mosquitoes, just giant wasps There are a whole host of insects and other things, real, imagined, and in between, that prey on the bodies and minds of me, my wife Carla and our six children.

A quarter of a century ago I somehow managed to get out of Paris where I had haunted a cheap hotel for months like a ghost trapped between this world and the next. I drove to Italy where I have lived ever since. I had a great contract with a famous publisher to write a biography of Benito Mussolini but had already spent the hefty advance and had yet to write a single word. On arrival in Italy, I did not even have enough money to pay the motorway toll. But the young woman in charge handed me a form to fill in and waved me through with a smile.