Nicholas Farrell

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.

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).

Dante’s Beach, Ravenna I was parked up in the Land Rover Defender on the narrow road that runs alongside the strip of dense pine forest next to the sea. My three youngest children, Rita (16), Giovanni Maria (14) and Giuseppe (ten), had just been for the first swim of the year and were now inside the forest picking wild asparagus. I could not see the sea, which was about 200 yards away on the other side of the forest, but I could hear the sound of it like the low-level roar of a distant motorway. Then I heard the honk of a car horn. I looked up from my phone, which I was using to help me contemplate the difference between Jeffrey ‘Lolita Express’ Epstein and Silvio ‘Bunga Bunga’ Berlusconi. A small grey car had stopped next to me.

Dante’s Beach, Ravenna I rang up my old best friend, Luke-John, for a chat a few days ago and to ask him about his mum, Rose Wylie. She is 91 and this week becomes the first ever female painter to be given a solo show at the Royal Academy. When I was in my late teens and early twenties, her house in the village of Newnham, near Faversham, became a safe haven for me, and I used to stay there a lot. Rose and her husband Roy, who was also an artist and died in 2014, were just so dead cool. Neither was well-known, and they had little money, but they were seriously intellectual, seriously stylish and seriously good-looking. He had been to Goldsmiths and then been a student of David Bomberg’s at the Borough Polytechnic, and was doing a PhD on him at the Royal College of Art.

Dante’s Beach, Ravenna We were en route to the junk shop in search of a pair of robust tongs for the fire in the kitchen, which is a vital source of heat in winter, and I was rowing with my family about the Jews. There were seven of us inside the Land Rover Defender: me at the wheel in notional control with my ‘Comandante’ Basque beret on my head to cover my bald patch. Next to me was my wife Carla, who has the best deck this side of Rimini, and five of our six children behind. The language being spoken was Italian as usual, but there were frequent shouted bursts of English from the back such as ‘Just shut the fuck up!’ or ‘Jesus fucking Christ!’, often involving several voices in unison like a chorus.

Dante’s Beach, Ravenna Maria, the boisterous new vizsla who gives the old one, Rocco, such a hard time, was in big trouble. She had killed one of our seven chickens, Gertrude, by biting her head off. Two of our six children – Caterina (22) and Rita (16) – wanted to dump Maria for good at the dog rescue centre immediately, or else take her back to the breeder we’d got her from in the hills. Giovanni Maria (14), who is able to identify each chicken and lets Giulia, his favourite, sit on his shoulder like a parrot, buried the dead Gertrude near where the tortoises used to live. He was gutted.

Dante’s Beach, Ravenna The unseasonably warm wind blowing in across the fields from the brooding Adriatic caused my wife Carla to announce ‘Tira aria da terremoto’ (‘earthquake air’). She feels our family lives on a knife edge, encircled by omens and demons. And who can blame her? Looked at one way, we have had it pretty tough of late. The other day the post person, who is a woman on a three-wheeled scooter and never brings good news, handed me with her grim habitual smirk a court order obtained by Ravenna city council. It requires us to demolish the front door of our house and a skylight on the sloping roof of the kitchen, plus the shutters on the first-floor windows.

Dante’s Beach, Ravenna I was in the Land Rover Defender with Rita, my youngest daughter (16), parked up near Dante’s tomb in the old city as we drank coffee from paper cups before she began her day at art school. On a wall in front of us that had possibly been there since the Romans, and definitely since the Renaissance, was scrawled in black spray paint: ‘Palestina libera dal fiume al mare!’ – Free Palestine from the river to the sea! I asked Rita what mark she’d got in her English literature oral test on Romeo and Juliet. I’d helped her prepare. I’d even found the correct Italian word for ‘apothecary’, as in ‘O true apothecary, Thy drugs are quick’. Every online source I had consulted had said, absurdly, that the correct word is ‘farmacista’.

Dante’s Beach, Ravenna ‘Welcome back, signore!’ said the woman in uniform at the all-seeing security doorway which passengers must walk through to be allowed on a plane, as if it were the Holy Door of St Peter. I was about to fly from Rimini on the Adriatic coast, not far south of my home, to Gatwick for a church service in remembrance of my father who had died two days short of his 100th birthday in July. I was with three of my six children and felt flattered, especially in front of them, to be remembered, proudly and deservedly famous at the Aeroporto Internazionale di Rimini e San Marino Federico Fellini. Two months earlier, I had flown alone from the same airport to be with my father as he died in his sleep.