Nicholas Farrell

To be honest, I felt relief when Pope Francis died. This had nothing much to do with his regular assertion, in contradiction of Catholic doctrine, that all war is unjust. Or his view that Ukraine should have ‘the courage to raise the white flag’ to stop more futile bloodshed which ironically is (more or less) Donald Trump’s view. Or his suggestion that Israel is guilty of genocide in Gaza. Or his more-the-merrier view on illegal immigrants. No. The cause turned not on politics but on the heart. However absurdly, I had come to see the Holy Father as a love rival. My wife Carla, a devout Catholic, was besotted with him. ‘How I love him!’ she used to say.

The 133 cardinal electors participating in the conclave entered the Sistine Chapel yesterday, singing Veni Creator Spiritus. As they conducted their first vote – which resulted in black smoke – they were no doubt unable to avoid contemplating the highly damaging stream of revelations that have plagued the frontrunner to be the next pope, Cardinal Pietro Parolin. The cardinals will be locked inside the chapel surrounded by Michelangelo’s astounding frescoes – incommunicado with the world but not with God – until two thirds of them coagulate around a single name. In the 13th century this process once took 1,006 days. But in the past 150 years the longest conclave has lasted five days. There was only one ballot yesterday but will be four on subsequent days.

The crisis that threatened to poison the secret conclave of cardinals which elects new popes has been resolved. It looks certain that disgraced Cardinal Giovanni Angelo Becciu – until 2018 number three in the Vatican hierarchy behind only the Secretary of State and the Holy Father himself – has fallen on his sword. Many in the Vatican and the Catholic Church will have breathed a sigh of relief. Many others will be furious.

Dante’s Beach, Ravenna ‘Fortune’s a right whore: If she give aught, she deals it in small parcels,/ That she may take away all at one swoop,’ wrote John Webster in The White Devil. I find it hard to disagree. I know fortune and luck are not quite the same thing, but I don’t believe the standard rebuke of the smug and the successful to those less fortunate: ‘You make your own luck in life.’ So it was that by a strange quirk of fate, King Charles III and Queen Camilla chose Ravenna rather than somewhere more touristically famous as the only place outside Rome they would go on their state visit to Italy the other day. It was as if somehow they knew that I lived here. Or else that some higher force wanted us to meet.

Dante’s Beach, Ravenna I have just refused to accept the local equivalent of an Oscar, which was to have been presented later this month in the Basilica di San Francesco next to the tomb of Dante Alighieri. I have done so because I believe I am not worthy. To accept would be unbecoming. It would dishonour both the award and me. They want to crown me with the ‘Alloro di Dante’ – the Laurels of Dante – which each year they do to a tiny number of people they feel have made an important contribution to literature. The ceremony involves the placing of a wreath made of bay leaves, similar to the one in the Botticelli portrait of Dante, on the heads of those awarded the prize.

Sky Atlantic's eight-part biopic, Mussolini: Son of the Century, is a great missed opportunity to tell the truth about fascism. Director Joe Wright could have told us something truly instructive about Benito Mussolini, the rebel from the foothills of the Apennines who invented fascism. Sadly, he has not. The series fails to explain to viewers the main reason why Mussolini was able to seize power so easily and relatively bloodlessly in 1922: many Italian people, sick of a paralysed democracy, wanted fascism. That is why Italy’s fascists, compared to the Nazis and the Soviets, killed far fewer political opponents. But Wright would have you believe that all that counted was fascist blackshirt violence.

Dante’s Beach, Ravenna The closest I get to a social life these days is when I sneak off into town for an hour or so to buy red wine, trying not to get caught by my wife and six children. I have found a place that sells a fantastic Sangiovese at €2.60 a litre which is dispensed like petrol from a cask behind the counter into one-and-a-half litre plastic bottles that once contained mineral water. I buy four bottles each time I go. Once home I smuggle them through my study window, then I enter the house through the main door as if I had come back from a hard day’s work. The wine is simple peasant stuff so, unlike most bottled wine, it contains hardly any chemical additives such as sulphites. Regardless of the damage being done, at least there is no hangover.

The death of Marianne Faithfull last week at the age of 78 has got me thinking again about female beauty. The obituaries were full of descriptions of the singer and actress, who was, as the Daily Mail put it, “the poster girl for the Swinging Sixties” and “the sixties angel with big tits”. The Daily Telegraph flagged a quote from her one-time manager: “She was everything you could want in a woman that you couldn’t possibly have”. Cobblers. Faithfull played the part speaking her lines as if she were a child Faithfull, Mick Jagger’s girlfriend in the second half of the 1960s, was not beautiful. She had a timid girly voice, slim boyish hips and sad downward-sloping eyes.

Dante’s Beach, Ravenna I came to Italy to write a biography of Benito Mussolini in the summer of 1998 and never left because in the bar next to the fascist dictator’s abandoned castle I met a woman who became my wife. The castle in the foothills of the Apennines looks down on the small town of Predappio, where the revolutionary socialist who invented fascism was born and is buried. As a result, I have had many meetings with members of the Mussolini family and have, I suspect, even talked with the Duce himself. Mussolini is a name that continues to torment Italy, just as the word ‘fascism’ continues to torment the world. And it all began there in Predappio. Mussolini is not a common name.

What else can you do but laugh? Former human rights supremo Sir Keir Starmer has done a deal to tackle illegal migrants with Giorgia Meloni – who is called ‘the heir to Mussolini’ by many on the left and in the media. The Home Secretary, Yvette Cooper, was in Rome at the weekend with a team of civil servants and police chiefs to put the finishing touches on the deal with Italy’s Interior Minister, Matteo Piantedosi. The deal will create what the Home Office grandiosely describes as ‘a new taskforce with Mafia-busting style tactics to seize the ill-gotten gains of criminal people smuggling gangs’.