Italy

From The Spectator, 10 October 1914: IT would be a base act to try to bribe or to threaten a neutral Power like Italy into joining the Allies. The notion of taking up the attitude that she may find herself in the wrong box when the peace is made is one which must be utterly hateful to every Englishman. Not only is it certain that if Italy remains neutral, and does not come to the assistance of the Allies, no vengeance will be taken upon her for her aloofness, but, more than that, no one here will even pretend that her failure to show an active friendship with us may

As the holidays draw to a close, Italian newspapers have been reporting with perplexity and distaste on the outlandish behaviour of foreign tourists in Italy, by which they mean young people from northern European countries. One report told of a couple making love in broad daylight on a bridge over the Grand Canal in Venice, the Ponte degli Scalzi (which, as a commentator pointed out, means ‘Bridge of the Barefooted’, not ‘Bridge of the Bare-bottomed’). Other reports talked of people sunbathing naked in public places or picnicking in large groups under the colonnades in St Mark’s Square. Venice suffered most from these excesses, but nowhere was immune. Florence and Rome

It’s much more stressful to live in the country than in a town. There are always threats of one kind or another — wind farms, housing developments, road ‘improvements’, and so on. And then there are often arguments with neighbours about this and that. If it’s not leylandii, which are not one of our problems in south Northamptonshire, there’s always something. We used to have peacocks that migrated to our neighbours’ gardens and proceeded to ruin them. (The peacocks were duly eliminated.) Then the man who mowed our lawn upset people by doing it too early in the morning and waking everybody up. Some of our neighbours have also been

There is a small light at the end of the tunnel but it comes too late, I fear, to save Italy from the abyss:  Silvio Berlusconi was yesterday acquitted on appeal of committing Bunga Bunga with Ruby the Heart-Stealer when she was sweet 17 for which he had been sentenced to seven years in prison. Che bello! Yet if ever a reason were needed for Britain to have absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with European courts of any kind, and the European Arrest Warrant in particular, we need look no further than the Berlusconi Bunga Bunga trial. If it could happen to him, a media tycoon and four times Italian

At the time of the armistice of September 1943, when the kingdom of Italy formally transferred its allegiance from the Germans to the invading Allies, there were some 40,000 British prisoners-of-war languishing in camps around the country. Camp gates were thrown open by fleeing Italian guards, but on orders from Whitehall thousands of PoWs stayed put until the Germans arrived and packed them off to other camps in Germany. Some 4,000 of them, however, set off to seek freedom either by heading north towards Switzerland or south towards the advancing Anglo–American forces, which had just arrived on the Italian mainland after their conquest of Sicily. Most of these escapees were

Another fairly unpleasant evening spent watching England playing football. Ah well. It used to be that England were renowned for two things: we could score from set pieces, and we knew how to defend set pieces. In fact we rarely scored from open play – but give us a corner, or a free kick, and suddenly we became dangerous. Similarly, we rarely conceded from set pieces. This was a consequence of the English game, I suppose. Against Italy we conceded from a set piece in fairly lamentable fashion. Worse, though, was the endless parade of wasted corners and free kicks. I don’t know how many corners we had in the

Harry’s Bar is a dull pale box. This is remarkable in Venice, which is a hospice for dying palaces, held up aching over the world’s most charismatic puddle; Harry’s is a transgressive anti-palazzo. It is a world-famous restaurant, the jewel of the Cipriani brand, and it is very conscious of this honour; it sells branded tagliarelli and books about the meals it served 30 years ago to the rich and famous; it is into auto-iconography, like the city it lives in. For this, and so much else, I blame Ernest Hemingway. He ate here after shooting birds in the lagoon and doesn’t the world know it? Some men fought against

It seems odd to enter a room dominated by what Aldous Huxley famously called ‘the greatest picture in the world’ to find not another soul there. Looking down from an end wall of the mediaeval civic hall in the quiet little Tuscan town of Borgo San Sepolcro, Piero della Francesca’s ‘Resurrection’ is an image of astonishing power, showing a stern-faced risen Christ stepping out of his tomb in the dawn light of the first Easter morning like an unstoppable force of nature, exuding supernatural authority as he turns the leaves on the trees behind him from wintry death to the new life of spring. This is a painting like no

Florence was in fog the day I arrived. Its buildings were bathed in white cloud, its people moved as though through steam. The Arno river was a dense strip of dew. At the Piazzale Michelangelo, the statue of David was etched by the surrounding murkiness to a stark silhouette, the renaissance defined by gothic cloud. I peered through a telescope that overlooked the city and saw nothing for miles. My friend Alessandro told me this was unusual for sunny Tuscany, which made me feel quite pleased. Perhaps with each day that passed I would see less of Florence — the ultimate tourist experience. At a nearby cemetery, the milky arms

The Italians are often thought of as being unpatriotic, and one can see why. They relentlessly denigrate their national institutions, abuse their politicians, and compare their democratic arrangements most unfavourably with those of the ‘more mature’ north European countries. You might conclude, therefore, that most Italians ‘hate’ Italy. But, of course, you would be wrong, just as the Daily Mail was wrong when it decided on the basis of Ralph Miliband’s political opinions that he ‘hated Britain’. The Mail’s justification for its now notorious headline (‘The Man Who Hated Britain’) was that Miliband Senior ‘had nothing but hatred for the values, traditions and institutions — including our great schools, the