Nicholas Farrell

Dante’s Beach, Ravenna I was at the wheel of our Land Rover Defender on Wednesday with my middle daughter Magdalena (18) en route to her weekly driving lesson, and I asked her: ‘How English do you feel?’ Carla, her mother, is Italian and Italy had just failed to qualify for the world cup this summer for the third time in a row, knocked out by – it pains Carla even to utter the wretched word – Bosnia. Such national sporting catastrophes always make me wonder about nations and what part in defining your nationality the blood in your veins plays, and what part your presence in a place plays Italy has won the world cup four times – the same number as Germany – and that’s more than any other country except Brazil.

Dante’s Beach, Ravenna I was parked up in the Land Rover Defender on the narrow road that runs alongside the strip of dense pine forest next to the sea. My three youngest children, Rita (16), Giovanni Maria (14) and Giuseppe (ten), had just been for the first swim of the year and were now inside the forest picking wild asparagus. I could not see the sea, which was about 200 yards away on the other side of the forest, but I could hear the sound of it like the low-level roar of a distant motorway. Then I heard the honk of a car horn. I looked up from my phone, which I was using to help me contemplate the difference between Jeffrey ‘Lolita Express’ Epstein and Silvio ‘Bunga Bunga’ Berlusconi. A small grey car had stopped next to me.

Dante’s Beach, Ravenna I rang up my old best friend, Luke-John, for a chat a few days ago and to ask him about his mum, Rose Wylie. She is 91 and this week becomes the first ever female painter to be given a solo show at the Royal Academy. When I was in my late teens and early twenties, her house in the village of Newnham, near Faversham, became a safe haven for me, and I used to stay there a lot. Rose and her husband Roy, who was also an artist and died in 2014, were just so dead cool. Neither was well-known, and they had little money, but they were seriously intellectual, seriously stylish and seriously good-looking. He had been to Goldsmiths and then been a student of David Bomberg’s at the Borough Polytechnic, and was doing a PhD on him at the Royal College of Art.

Dante’s Beach, Ravenna We were en route to the junk shop in search of a pair of robust tongs for the fire in the kitchen, which is a vital source of heat in winter, and I was rowing with my family about the Jews. There were seven of us inside the Land Rover Defender: me at the wheel in notional control with my ‘Comandante’ Basque beret on my head to cover my bald patch. Next to me was my wife Carla, who has the best deck this side of Rimini, and five of our six children behind. The language being spoken was Italian as usual, but there were frequent shouted bursts of English from the back such as ‘Just shut the fuck up!’ or ‘Jesus fucking Christ!’, often involving several voices in unison like a chorus.

My teenage self was right. Brigitte Bardot, who died this weekend, symbolised sex and freedom. It’s why I had a poster of her on my study wall at school in which she was topless in a white cowboy hat and faded blue denims with the zip undone to reveal that she had no knickers. Needless to say it was not long before someone burnt a hole in her crotch with an aerosol can and lighter. But I still kept the poster up. Such was the impact of Bardot on teenage boys like me that at a certain point I hitch-hiked off to Saint-Tropez where she lived. Once there, I moved about barefoot in faded denims and Breton fisherman’s shirt, just like she used to do. Dreaming.

Dante’s Beach, Ravenna Maria, the boisterous new vizsla who gives the old one, Rocco, such a hard time, was in big trouble. She had killed one of our seven chickens, Gertrude, by biting her head off. Two of our six children – Caterina (22) and Rita (16) – wanted to dump Maria for good at the dog rescue centre immediately, or else take her back to the breeder we’d got her from in the hills. Giovanni Maria (14), who is able to identify each chicken and lets Giulia, his favourite, sit on his shoulder like a parrot, buried the dead Gertrude near where the tortoises used to live. He was gutted.

Dante’s Beach, Ravenna The unseasonably warm wind blowing in across the fields from the brooding Adriatic caused my wife Carla to announce ‘Tira aria da terremoto’ (‘earthquake air’). She feels our family lives on a knife edge, encircled by omens and demons. And who can blame her? Looked at one way, we have had it pretty tough of late. The other day the post person, who is a woman on a three-wheeled scooter and never brings good news, handed me with her grim habitual smirk a court order obtained by Ravenna city council. It requires us to demolish the front door of our house and a skylight on the sloping roof of the kitchen, plus the shutters on the first-floor windows.

Dante’s Beach, Ravenna I was in the Land Rover Defender with Rita, my youngest daughter (16), parked up near Dante’s tomb in the old city as we drank coffee from paper cups before she began her day at art school. On a wall in front of us that had possibly been there since the Romans, and definitely since the Renaissance, was scrawled in black spray paint: ‘Palestina libera dal fiume al mare!’ – Free Palestine from the river to the sea! I asked Rita what mark she’d got in her English literature oral test on Romeo and Juliet. I’d helped her prepare. I’d even found the correct Italian word for ‘apothecary’, as in ‘O true apothecary, Thy drugs are quick’. Every online source I had consulted had said, absurdly, that the correct word is ‘farmacista’.

Dante’s Beach, Ravenna ‘Welcome back, signore!’ said the woman in uniform at the all-seeing security doorway which passengers must walk through to be allowed on a plane, as if it were the Holy Door of St Peter. I was about to fly from Rimini on the Adriatic coast, not far south of my home, to Gatwick for a church service in remembrance of my father who had died two days short of his 100th birthday in July. I was with three of my six children and felt flattered, especially in front of them, to be remembered, proudly and deservedly famous at the Aeroporto Internazionale di Rimini e San Marino Federico Fellini. Two months earlier, I had flown alone from the same airport to be with my father as he died in his sleep.

Claudia Cardinale, who died this week aged 89, was one of few Italian actresses to achieve global stardom along with Gina Lollobrigida and Sophia Loren.  Whereas Lollobrigida and Loren embodied the beauty of Italy, Cardinale – I always feel – embodied the beauty of the Mediterranean. Her face and physique were the irresistible but perilous fruit of its people and cultures. The Italians call it: ‘Me-di-terr-aneo.’ Many years ago, when I was involved with a woman from the Italian deep south, someone told me: ‘If you want to marry such a woman, you must not travel by plane to seek the consent of her father, nor by train or car, you must go on foot, and with a stone in your shoe, because only then will you understand what you are letting yourself in for.