Nicholas Farrell

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).

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.