Nick Farrell: Italy

Dante’s Beach, Ravenna I was on my way to buy a bougainvillea from the plant shop with my middle son, Giovanni Maria, 14. We were in the Land Rover Defender, windows down with ‘Satisfaction’ by the Rolling Stones on the stereo at very high ‘hey, hey, hey!’ volume. Each time the chorus arrived – ‘I can’t get no!/ Hey, hey, hey!/ That’s what I say!’ – we rapped our knuckles on the dashboard in time to the gunshot drumbeat of Charlie Watts. We drove past the parched fields by the sea that looked like they would catch fire if someone so much as uttered a word out of place. The Stones are one of my very few favourite bands although I don’t listen to anything they’ve done since 1974, as it lacks the raw beauty of their first decade.

Dante’s Beach, Ravenna I was at the wheel of the Land Rover Defender on the mile-long dirt track that leads to the main road from our house and I was still feeling existentially disturbed by our defeat at the hands of the awful Argies. Dusk was falling and I just wanted to get into the village, buy a couple of litres of red and get back without running into a police roadblock. There are only four inhabited houses on our L-shaped dirt track, which at the other end peters out into the fields near the sea, and so there is rarely any traffic at all. But in front of me a small white car had stopped. A man’s naked arm protruding from the passenger window waved me to a halt.

Dante’s Beach, Ravenna In an attempt to avoid the infernal heat and the rhythmic maracas-style racket of the cicadas in the trees, I have become nocturnal. I go to bed at 7 a.m. and get up at 4 p.m. This may seem wrong, a sign of moral failure or mental breakdown, but let me remind you that the wise men bearing gifts did the same. As Longfellow writes: ‘And they travelled by night and they slept by day,/ For their guide was a beautiful, wonderful star.’ It is that moment in the night before the cock-crow hour, and the silence is more or less total, apart from the stirrings of the sea a mile or so across the fields.

Dante’s Beach, Ravenna I know that, as the heat intensifies, you want me to write about the highly trained nudists who have stolen the best bit of our beautiful beach and what such manifestations of diversity, equity and inclusion entail. But I’m not going to, because I feel I must write instead about Churchill and Mussolini. In a three-hour documentary, the Italian equivalent of the BBC has (more or less) accused Churchill of ordering the execution of Mussolini on Lake Como in April 1945. His motive, apparently, was to stop the Duce making public secret wartime letters between the two of them that were very damaging to Churchill.