When Pope Francis complained recently about too much frociaggine (faggotry) in the Catholic Church, he certainly struck a chord in our house here at Dante’s Beach near Ravenna.
Nudism used to be illegal on pain of up to three years in prison, but the nudists simply ignored the law
We live a mile inland from one of the last stretches of Adriatic coast not lined by umbrellas and concrete but by sand dunes and pine forests. It is a spiaggia libera (free beach) as well, and so belongs to everyone. However, the most beautiful bit cannot be used by the silent majority: it has been stolen by a small minority of highly trained nudists, mostly gay. People who prefer to avoid mass nudity have had to go elsewhere.
Many would call it Heaven though Dante himself would beg to differ. In the Divine Comedy, which the great poet wrote while wandering around here after being banished for life from Florence, he consigned sodomites, as practising gays were called, to the seventh circle of Hell.
My Italian wife Carla, devout Catholic mother of our six children, believes, as many Catholics do, that love between two men is fine but sex is a sin. So too, despite his frequent lack of clarity, does her beloved Pope.
I asked my 18-year-old son Francesco-Winston what the young think. He is always playfully calling his two brothers Giovanni-Maria, 12, and Giuseppe, eight, froci (faggots). ‘It is funny but the Pope shouldn’t use such a word,’ he said. ‘He’s a man of God.’ But many gay men do not seem too bothered, to judge from the banners at the recent Gay Pride march in Rome reading: ‘You can never have too much faggotry!’
So it was that one afternoon this week I set off with Giovanni-Maria and the youngest of our three daughters, Rita, 15, to get some mussels from the beach to make spaghetti con le cozze for supper.
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