Italy is a land of beauty and death

I was nine. It was Florence, in mid-July. My parents bravely led my younger brother and me through a day of sweaty sight-seeing. We had just been up and down the Duomo and were cooling ourselves with ice cream in an adjacent square when there was a hideous bang. At first, we thought it was an explosion. Then, as we passed the Duomo again a few minutes later, we saw something so grisly I still remember it with a shudder: paramedics trying to get a stretcher covered in a white sheet into the ambulance, and on the ground, a huge splat of what looked like spaghetti sauce. It took a moment for me to get my head around what that must be, and how it related to the bang, and then I couldn’t unwrap my head from it.

Many years of subsequent travel to Italy – the most intoxicating, alluring part of Europe – have brought more encounters with tragedy and death.