Dante’s Beach, Ravenna
The youngest of our six children, Giuseppe, nine, received the Eucharist for the first time on Sunday. He and the other 12 new communicants looked angelic in their white robes. They all had impressive wooden crosses hanging from their necks and the five girls had wreaths of tiny flowers in their jet-black hair. Once Don Mauro had finished dispensing the Body of Christ, the bells peeled as if a wedding had taken place. There followed a pleasant open-air lunch by the sea and I wondered: ‘Is it better to live in Italy or Britain?’
Certainly, society is less fractured here. The weather is more helpful to both body and soul and the food is effortlessly superior, despite all the delusional British bragging about the amazing results of fancy fusion.
Italy, yes, is a great place to live – but it’s an awful place to work. Employers avoid proper contracts at all costs as that would mean shelling out on ‘extras’ such as tax and national insurance and paying a living wage. Last summer, the Venezuelan woman in charge of the restaurant by the beach where our middle daughter, Magdalena, 17, was a waitress failed to cough up the pittance she’d agreed to pay. But Magdalena and her mother, Carla, were too timid to cause a scene.
‘Basta!’ I bellowed manfully. ‘Your mentality is why the Mafia exists.’ Risking not just the wrath of Carla but a heart attack, I stormed off to confront the Venezuelan myself with Magdalena in tow. I told the woman that the wages she owed my daughter were anyway those of a slave and that her sister, a lawyer, would be interested. In addition, I told her that I was a member of His Majesty’s Press, as she could see from the word ‘PRESS’ on the inside of my Land Rover Defender’s windscreen. She disappeared and after five minutes came back and contemptuously threw down some bank notes she’d crumpled into a ball.
‘Papa,’ said Magdalena once we were back in the Defender. ‘You were brilliant!’ For once, I felt like a proper father. But such tales are small beer compared to some of the things I have had to go through workwise.
Italy’s notoriously slow, incompetent and unjust judicial system has effectively made it impossible for me to work legally in Italy, thanks to someone I shall refer to as Aldo X. The other day, yet another surreal legal document arrived from Signor X who in 2018 somehow managed in my absence to get a court judgment against me for €50,000, which I am for some unfathomable reason unable to challenge even though I do not owe him this money. Every time I earn something in Italy, if he gets to find out, he seizes it.
In this latest legal action to get ‘his’ money, Signor X is trying with no evidence to prove that our house which is owned by my wife is in fact half mine. To help him in his mission, he has decided I am not really a member of His Majesty’s Press but in fact of His Majesty’s Secret Service.
Italy is a great place to live – but an awful place to work. Employers do all they can to avoid proper contracts
In his view, this is relevant as he is insinuating the judges are biased in my favour because I am a British spy. So he is demanding that those judges call me to swear on oath, in the affirmative or negative, about a series of statements such as: ‘I swear and in swearing confirm that I am an external resource of MI6, and I was sent to Italy to write about Benito Mussolini.’ I also have to accept or reject on oath that I was sent to Italy to deny the truth that Britain caused the rise and fall of fascism and assassinated Mussolini on Lake Como in 1945 – and whether MI6 pays me ‘£2,500/3,000 a month via transversal means’.
None of this seems relevant to the trial, let alone to reality, but that doesn’t seem to worry the judges who just let it all grind on. In the latest case, Signor X lost the original trial and this is the appeal which may end this year but then again may not. Even if it does, he can appeal again.
The cancerous saga began in 2005 when Signor X, a lawyer, offered to defend me in criminal and civil libel trials I faced after I called someone a traitor to the West. Signor X said he’d do it for free because he ‘admired’ my journalism. I was quite famous in Italy at the time because with Boris I’d interviewed Silvio Berlusconi for this magazine – with results that caused headlines for a couple of weeks and the media tycoon’s government to wobble for 15 minutes.
Stupidly, I agreed to allow Signor X to defend me, though I replaced him after the first criminal and civil trials (which I lost) as he seemed more interested in plugging his conspiracy theories than defending me.
Just in case, I kept a 2006 fax in which, at my request, he had confirmed: ‘Between us there will be an agreement “quota lite”… if the outcome in the case were to be negative, it will mean that I will have worked gratis.’ But I never got the chance to use the fax because I didn’t find out about the 2018 case at which he got judgment against me for fees I did not owe until it was over. Incredibly, under Italian law I had no grounds for appeal. All I can do is try to fend off his relentless legal assaults on my life.
Meanwhile, the three hens we have just got for our children have laid their first eggs. They only cost €5 each and I’ve ordered four more. We will have to keep them safe though, not just from Signor X but also from the wolves that we sometimes hear howling at night near the Martello tower.
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