Nicholas Farrell Nicholas Farrell

How I ran away to Italy

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issue 02 March 2024

A quarter of a century ago I somehow managed to get out of Paris where I had haunted a cheap hotel for months like a ghost trapped between this world and the next. I drove to Italy where I have lived ever since.

I had a great contract with a famous publisher to write a biography of Benito Mussolini but had already spent the hefty advance and had yet to write a single word. On arrival in Italy, I did not even have enough money to pay the motorway toll. But the young woman in charge handed me a form to fill in and waved me through with a smile.

She came crashing through the open kitchen window – terrifying me – while I was cooking a fry-up

I had diverted to Paris only because a treacherous Frenchman persuaded me to write an instant book with him about the death of Princess Diana in August 1997. The idea was to make a fast buck and get the hell out but the French publisher delayed publication, then went bust. To rub salt in my wounds, France then won the World Cup.

My destination was Predappio, a sleepy little town in the foothills of the Apennines, south-east of Bologna, where Mussolini was born and is buried as if he were some kind of hero or saint.

It was infernally hot that first summer. One day I left my cash card on the dashboard of the car and came back to find it buckled. ‘Writing these big biographies is a steep learning curve,’ my editor had said.

The car was my father’s burgundy Honda Prelude which he had donated to my cause through gritted teeth. In Paris, I lost it for several months because, worse the wear for booze one night, I forgot where I had parked it.

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