Nicholas Farrell

Dante’s Beach, Ravenna My mother Joyce was a very beautiful woman who became what ‘normal’ people call ‘mad’. My question has always been: why did she go mad? But also: did she in fact go mad? She had meditated under a blanket with the Beatles and the Maharishi in Bangor in 1967. She had been the life and soul of every party. But that was not, I feel, the explanation. She died in poverty in 1982, aged just 50, in a hospice in distant Newcastle upon Tyne where she had returned from Kent in desperation to live in the derelict two-up two-down where she had grown up. I was there with her throughout that final year. ‘Paranoid schizophrenic,’ some doctor once told me, whatever that means. For let us not forget the Russian proverb: ‘The paranoid is always right.

Dante’s Beach, Ravenna I opened the WhatsApp message and read: ‘Massed missile and drone warning. About eighth since I’ve been here. I’m deep underground.’ It was from my old friend James. ‘They organise camping stools in the metro,’ he added. He was in Kyiv, where he had first gone in 1997 with his acoustic guitar and electronic keyboard and where he had met his future wife, Svetlana, who lived in distant Kharkiv. Their romance blossomed in Gurzuf on the Black Sea, where Chekhov had a house, and where they met up four times that summer. They moved first to Bratislava on the Danube where he founded a magazine. They then moved on to a small town just over the border in Austria, where he dabbled in property and they still live. They have three children.

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.

Dante’s Beach, Ravenna When I was still beautiful, a famous Italian TV art historian and politician chose me to be a candidate in the elections to the European parliament for his Partito della Bellezza (Party of Beauty). The idea – as Dostoevsky told us in The Idiot – was that beauty will save the world. The highlight of my brief attempt to enter politics was a trip to Venice where I went by vaporetto along the Grand Canal to the 16th-century Court of Appeal to lodge my candidature amid the echoes of its vast marbled interior. I got 54 votes. Casanova, who was from Venice, claimed in his Histoire de ma Vie to have slept with 122 women. A paltry sum. I beat him hands down, though to my shame cannot remember the names of most of them. Or even their faces.

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. We drove on slowly, passing half a dozen or so parked cars with solitary men inside them ‘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).