Nicholas Farrell

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’.

Dante’s Beach, Ravenna It is strange how events elide and create a pattern whose significance remains elusive. I had just returned from a raid under the cover of the night on a huge field near our house a mile from the sea. I had about 50kg of ripe tomatoes in plastic bags in the back of my battered old seven-seater Land Rover Defender and was wondering if, as an impoverished father of six, I could use the Thomist defence: ‘It is not theft, properly speaking, to take secretly and use another’s property in a case of extreme need: because that which he takes for the support of his life becomes his own property by reason of that need’ (Aquinas, Summa Theologica). ‘Not until you flog the Defender you can’t,’ I heard the chorus of faces in the ancient gallery chant.

Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has declared war on Italy’s judges who are trying to kybosh at birth her much vaunted scheme to offshore illegal migrants to Albania.  Last Friday, a court in Rome dealt Meloni’s Albania scheme a potentially fatal blow by ruling that the first migrants sent to Albania cannot be detained and must be freed because their countries of origin – Bangladesh and Egypt – are unsafe.  The Toghe Rosse have Meloni in their sights She has now issued an emergency decree to change the law and her ministers are confident that it will stop the judges making similar rulings in the future.

I can think of few things worse than being a tourist. So I must admit that I did manage a smirk, as I swelter my way through yet another Italian summer, at reports that the mayor of Portofino has apparently banned air-conditioning in an attempt to preserve the beauty of his town.  Yes, of course, I enjoyed the vision this conjured up of the bling and buy rich who these days infest the bijou little seaside town sweating like pigs – or the poor.

There was not a Spaniard in sight, I was pretty sure of that. But I was surrounded by the enemy, nevertheless. Naturally, the enemy included my Italian wife, Carla. We were at the open-air restaurant for the Euro 2024 final in one of the two village campsites not far from the nudist beach. If England beat Spain, I would have a plausible excuse to break out the booze after being on the wagon for far too many months and get patriotically sloshed. I knew that none of those gathered in front of the giant TV screen beneath the stars could be from Spain, because the Spanish do not come to Dante’s Beach near Ravenna. Nudism isn’t really their cup of tea. Instead, we get loads of Germans and Dutch who drive thousands of miles to strut about naked in front of each other.