How to get ahead in Tuscany

29 June 2006

When Jenny came round this morning to get her strimmer back, she leant in darkly and said, ‘It’s like having a house in Blackpool!’ Standing on the edge of my olive grove, lizards basking behind us on the pink wall, we wrinkled our noses in distaste as yet another car with English licence plates growled up the hill. A dark green Jag packed full of luggage. ‘I blame the television,’ Jenny said, batting a shimmering dung-beetle away. ‘All those programmes about moving abroad. And English house prices, of course.’

Down in B—– the whole English community was appalled to note that the newsagent had recently started stocking the Daily Mail — ‘Printed in France’. Only one copy a day and we’d rather die than buy it. It’s for the tourists, you know. For the key to climbing the ladders and avoiding the snakes is to be Italianissimo. We read Corriere della Sera and we bloody well like it. Actually, I saw Jenny down the mountain in B—– yesterday and she asked me, as casually as she could, if I’d bought the offending item. ‘No,’ I said, acidly. ‘I left it for you.’ That told her. In fact, I had been in and, when the shop assistant wasn’t looking, I had let my gaze slide over to where it would have been. But somebody else had snapped it up.

‘Spiacente, Signora. Già è stato venduto,’ the girl said. Caught red-handed in the act of admitting I was homesick — a textbook error. Slide down a very long snake.

I bought Corriere della Sera as haughtily as I could. Up a rung or two. It is no secret that, as with any game, one has to play to the best of one’s ability, but one also has to hobble one’s opponents to stand a chance of winning in this class-saturated expatriate competition. There are a few easy ways of doing this, known to English expats the length and breadth of Italy.

You might start, for example, by smiling pityingly at the sunburnt fools who would attempt to get lunch in a restaurant after two. But this is beginner’s stuff and won’t get you far.