Italy

Dante’s Beach, Ravenna It is raining at last, thank God, and the sound of thunder cascades across the heavens like some kind of conversation. This infernally hot summer is drawing to a close. The swallows left last week for sub-Saharan Africa, the bee-eaters the week before. Even the nudists – well, most of them – are going away, back to Amsterdam, Düsseldorf, Bologna and Milan. Yet I dread, as we slide inexorably once more towards winter, not the ghost-town reality of a tourist village out of season, but the deep cold and the dense fog to come like the ghost of the sea. I always wonder at this time of year: will I be granted one more summer? How did it ever happen that I ended up here in Italy like a gypsy or an imam as the father of six children?

Dante’s Beach, Ravenna When Machiavelli was tortured, then banished from Florence in 1513 to his modest farm in the Tuscan countryside, in the afternoons he used to “sink into vulgarity,” as he put it, and play cards and backgammon with the local men in the tavern next to his small house.

Dante’s Beach, Ravenna We were having dinner in the Osteria del Tempo Perso (the Hostelry of Lost Time). It is in the old city which in the 5th century was the last capital of the western Roman empire as, besieged by various types of barbarian, the final fall drew ever nearer. I was drinking again. The rules are simple: I can drink when abroad, defined as anywhere outside the province of Ravenna, which I rarely leave; or else when anyone foreign – i.e. non-Italian – comes to visit, which is even rarer. My younger brother Simon, the KC, had come for a long weekend with his second wife Cyrena, two of his four children from his first marriage, Sam (33) and Rufus (28), and his stepdaughter, Jemima (22).

Look out from the balcony of your room at Le Sirenuse and you’ll see the trio of rocks jutting out of the Tyrrhenian Sea that gave the hotel, one of the last true greats in the world, its name. The three jagged islets form an archipelago, which is said by the Greeks to have been the home of sirens whose enchanting songs lured sailors to their deaths. Le Sirenuse, a scarlet palazzo wedged into the cliff-face of Positano, boasts similar powers of attraction. In a place known around the world for its beauty, Le Sirenuse stands out. It has developed a reputation as the loveliest hotel in the world; somehow, it exceeds that billing.